Brown Bag Series - Seeking (and making) refuge in, out of, and beyond Europe: An ethnography of world-making

Abstract: This presentation leverages the life history of an individual whose multiple displacements and emplacements in, out of, and beyond Europe in the last decade of the 20^th century offer opportunities to explore the lived and experiential of dimensions of seeking and finding refuge in modern times. This multi-sited account of uprootedness and re-rootedness helps relativize a jural category, namely the Convention refugee, by advancing a notion of refuge as continuum. The analysis will invite a shift of the analytical direction toward fluidity, performativity, and practice, and away from the rigidity of bureaucratically crafted knowledge that categorizes, classifies, and constitutes 'the refugee' as a legal construct.

Bio: Fethi Keles is a cultural anthropologist specializing in the ethnographic study of forced migration, refugees, and displacement with a focus on the experiences of Bosnian diaspora. He is currently a Fellow in the 2026-2027 cohort of the Weatherhead Scholars Program at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.