Making a Home: Transportation Mobility and Well-Being Among Tucson Refugees
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Join us on Zoom for a virtual presentation by Associate Professor Orhon Myadar as she presents her work as a 2021-22 Udall Center Fellow, followed by a question-and-answer session. The Udall Center Fellows Program offers a semester off from normal teaching to allow for creative scholarship and pursuit of funds to further the Fellow’s research.
Learn more about the Udall Center Fellows Program
Refugee issues have garnered significant attention in political and public debates in recent years, with the number of globally-displaced persons across the world reaching a record high. Today, 82.4 million, or 1 in 95 people in the world, have been forcibly uprooted from their homes and homelands. Only a small fraction of forcibly displaced people get resettled each year in safe countries. While resettlement typically allows millions of forcibly displaced persons to escape from unpredictable and often dangerous conditions of displacement, most refugees experience an array of challenges after resettlement as they integrate into new communities. Many of these challenges are related to their ability to get to and from places that are important to their sense of autonomy and well-being, including sites of education, employment, worship and medical care. In this talk, Dr. Myadar will present some of the key findings of her research project on mobility-related challenges faced by refugees in Tucson, Arizona after their resettlement. Drawing on multi-disciplinary research, the project provides a window into the lived context of post-resettlement refugee life experiences. By doing so, the project challenges the tendency to homogenize forcibly displaced persons into a stereotypical ‘refugee figure’ – a figure that has no agency and is identical in his/her experiences to other refugees. We do so by relying on stories of different people whose experiences and journeys are unique to them. This project was funded by the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC; #1377), a U.S. DOT University Transportation Center.