Global Migration

Global Migration at the Kenan Institute for Ethics combines faculty and student-led research, innovative educational programs, and partnerships with practitioners and communities.

Global Migration students, researchers, and practitioners aim to create a better understanding of displacement, voluntary and forced migration, refugee camp life, and third-country resettlement, and to shape debates about immigration and citizenship policy in the United States and abroad.

A unique partnership with UNHCR has allowed Institute researchers over the past two years to interview Bhutanese refugees in refugee camps in Nepal and to follow up with some of these refugees in Durham, North Carolina, where they have resettled. Institute researchers have also worked with Iraqi refugees living throughout the greater Cairo area.

Current research, educational programs, and community engagement endeavors include the Refugee Resettlement Project, DukeImmerse Uprooted/Rerouted, DukeEngage Dublin, Ethics, Leadership & Global Citizenship, student-taught ESL courses, and a refugee-women-led start-up company.

In the fall, we partnered with the UN Refugee Agency to install Nowhere People: The Face of Global Statelessness, a photography exhibition by Greg Constantine. As part of of the opening events, a panel on the ethics of photography was held with Constantine, Charity Tooze of the UNHCR. Global Migration has also formed partnerships to hold several events in Spring 2013. In January, a symposium was organized together with Duke Law School, “Perspectives on Migration, Governance, and Citizenship.” Also in January, Post-doctoral Fellow Nadia El-Shaarawi organized a day-long event on the ethics and politics of humanitarian intervention in contexts of migration and conflict, “Conflict, Migration and Humanitarianism: The Ethics and Politics of Intervention.” In February, a Campus Grant is supporting an evening of conversation with North Korean refugees. Global Migration is also partnering in a three-day conference on international migration to feature a film, performance, and panel symposium, Movements and Exchanges in an Unequal World.

Recent past projects and events include the Brookings-Duke Immigration Roundtable, which addressed the implicit trade-offs and assumptions underlying the current immigration debate and generated policy recommendations that better reflect the wide range of views Americans have on immigration; Moralities of Migration, a global series of workshops and conferences exploring ethical aspects of migration past, present, and future, and Refugees, Rights, Resettlement, Duke’s 2012 Winter Forum, a three-day conference involving students, academics, government and NGO leaders, and the local refugee community.