The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora

What is home? This is the question at the heart of Wendy Pearlman's The Home I Worked to Make. Brutal government repression turned the peaceful protests of 2011 in Syria into one of the most catastrophic conflicts of our time. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians were killed and millions more displaced. The Home I Worked to Make explores the aftermath of this displacement and the outflow of refugees. Based on hundreds of interviews conducted across more than a decade with Syrians now on five different continents, it understands home as both struggle and achievement. These Syrian stories of leaving, losing, searching, and finding (or not finding) home recast "refugee crises" as acts of diaspora-making.

Join us at the IHGMS for a discussion of displacement, diaspora, and the meaning of home with author Wendy Perlman and discussants David Mednicoff, Ruxandra Paul, and Musbah Shaheen.