The BU Center on Forced Displacement team hopes the biannual magazine is a platform for sharing ideas and solutions (from left): Baiden Wright (Pardee’23), Muhammad Zaman, Micah Trautmann (GRS’24), Carrie J. Preston, Selma Hedlund (GRS’23), and Shandra Back (COM’24). Photo by Jackie Ricciardi

Forced Displacement

BU Center on Forced Displacement Magazine Highlights Plight of Millions Compelled to Flee Their Homes

Critical Forced Displacement brings together academics, artists, and displaced people to offer different views of the global issue

A few pages into the first issue of Critical Forced Displacement, the biannual magazine from Boston University’s Center on Forced Displacement (CFD), sits an essay by visual artist Michel Flores Tavizón. In it, she describes her experience as a border commuter—in her case, a Mexican citizen who crosses the US-Mexico border to attend university in Texas, where there’s more academic and economic opportunity. 

Eventually, she writes, she finds herself speaking more English than Spanish, and shifting her social life to the Texas side of the border. “Like many international students living in border towns,” Flores writes, “I live in Mexico, but cross to attend university in the United States. This constant crossing has simultaneously blurred and redefined the divisions between countries for me.”

Flores’ essay is just one of the 12 contributions to the magazine, all surrounding the topic of borders—and all aiming to challenge perceptions on an issue fraught with politics, disagreements, and distortions. 

A section of writer and artist Michel Flores Tavizón’s contribution to the first issue. Courtesy of the Center on Forced Displacement

According to the CFD’s director, Muhammad Zaman, Critical Forced Displacement is a journal in the vein of the Boston Review or the New Yorker. Each issue has a theme that contributors explore through the lens of forced displacement with photo essays, poetry, analyses, and personal stories.

The first issue launched during the spring 2024 semester. The second comes out November 13.

Forced displacement refers to the involuntary migration and dispersion of individuals and communities due to circumstances such as war, famine, climate change, or persecution. According to the European Commission, 120 million people have been displaced globally. The CFD, established in July 2022, is an interdisciplinary research center for students, staff, policymakers, researchers, artists, and more, from BU and beyond.

“The CFD is a platform for people to come together and think about the ways in which the conditions of forcibly displaced people can be improved,” says Zaman, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor of Biomedical Engineering and International Health in BU’s College of Engineering. From researching the association between repeated air raids and cholera outbreaks amid conflict in Yemen to comparing practices along the US-Mexico and European Union-Balkans borders, the work coming out of the center recognizes “that there is no one discipline that has a monolith on addressing these challenges,” Zaman says. “In fact, these issues are so complex and multifaceted, that we need everyone involved.” 

That’s part of the ethos behind the magazine. 

Critical Forced Displacement sources contributions from all over the world—from students, scholars, and nonacademics alike, including displaced persons. (The center offers translation and localization services for all contributions.) It’s not a research journal, the CFD stresses—it’s a way to bridge the gaps between academic work, the arts, and lived experiences. 

“While we are very proud of our relationship with an academic institution, we also want to make sure that the issue is not limited by the ceiling of academia,” Zaman explains. “The idea with the magazine is to enrich our conversations in a bidirectional way: take the things we do to [readers and displaced persons], and hear from people who have a lot to say [about the topic], all in a way that’s accessible.” 

The magazine also has an online component, which the center plans to expand. It also hopes to launch a dedicated magazine section to highlight the work of young and emerging artists, scholars, and practitioners, says CFD associate director Carrie J. Preston.

The second issue of Critical Forced Displacement explores the idea of journeys. 

While the first issue centered on borders, “people who are internally displaced by war or persecution might not ever cross a border,” says Preston, a BU College of Arts & Sciences professor of English and of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. “With this issue, we seek to account for the diverse and often discontinuous journeys taken by displaced people. We also figuratively honor the journeys that we all take as we seek to understand forced displacement from our various positions and perspectives.”

Contributions to the second issue include a book review by Preston, a photo essay by a BU undergraduate on displaced Venezuelans traveling through Colombia, a poem by a resident physician at the University of California, San Francisco, and an essay from a Hungary-based journalist on Muslim refugees in Ukraine.

A launch party for the new issue will be held Wednesday, November 13, from 2 to 4 pm in the common room of the Kilachand Honors College.

Ultimately, the Critical Forced Displacement team hopes the magazine inspires empathy for the experience of displaced peoples, and invites readers to think further about what displacement means. The contributors hope the same. Flores, the student and artist, opted to share her story in order to highlight a way of life that people don’t always think about.

“I mainly wanted to normalize border commuters, as they are more common than people think,” Flores says. “Most of my work revolves around being a border commuter—something that even in the Rio Grande Valley is not talked about enough.”

In her essay, Flores refers to the area that separates her hometown of Matamoros, Tamaulipas, from the border town of Brownsville, Tex., as a nepantla territory—a Chicano term for “in the middle of” or “in between.” She quotes the scholar Gloria Anzaldúa, who defines nepantlas as “places of constant tension, where the missing or absent pieces can be summoned back, where transformation and healing may be possible, where wholeness is just out of reach but seems attainable.” It’s a concept that resonates with Flores—and, perhaps, with readers too.