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Paper short abstract:

This study utilizes explores the ways in which resettled refugees produce knowledge about themselves and their communities, including how they visually represent themselves and tell stories about displacement. This project includes 40,000 images, with more than 1,700 publicly available.

Paper long abstract:

This study utilizes explores the ways in which resettled refugees produce knowledge about themselves and their communities, including how they visually represent themselves and how they tell stories about displacement through photography and social media. The creation of visual “refugee spaces” include representations of life before resettlement (such as camps in Nepal and Thailand), in resettled communities (including in Utica, New York), and in the digital world created via Facebook, Instagram, and other virtual platforms. Analysis of visual representations reveal the desire to exert agency and self-expression, consideration of the role of elders in community life, revisit shared memories, and document objects that relate to rapid culture change.

This project draws from a collection of more than 40,000 images that have been gathered since 2012, with more than 1,700 of them now available from the New York Heritage Digital Collection via the “Refugees Starting Over” project (https://nyheritage.org/collections/refugees-starting-over-collection). Oral history interviews associated with 100 selected photographs within this collection offer perspectives from refugee photographers and photo subjects, centering the perspectives of displaced people in the viewing of these images. This paper is part of a larger project aimed at making this photography collection accessible to the public, including the creation of grade school lesson plans associated with refugee history, memories, and rights.