CFD Team Spotlight: Micah Trautmann, Graduate Fellow
The Newsletter Team sat down for an interview with one of our graduate fellows, Micah Trautmann, for an interview about his work, passions, hobbies, and special CFD projects. The transcript of our interview is below.
CFD Team: Tell us a bit about yourself.
I was born and bred in New England, which always comes home for me when the weather starts changing in the fall — everyone else seems to lament the end of summer, but I’m delighted to start living in sweaters again. Currently I am finishing up my PhD in the Department of Philosophy here at BU, alongside working here at the CFD. My research mostly focuses on how we should conceptualize the seemingly unique harms of protracted displacement — when refugees are unable to find genuine refuge for years or decades on end — as well as who bears moral responsibility for that condition of prolonged placelessness.
CFD Team: What is your role within the Center?
I am a Graduate Fellow here at the Center on Forced Displacement, attached primarily to our ongoing Mellon Sawyer Seminar series on border externalization. I’ve been helping to organize those seminars, including being the principal architect of last month’s seminar on the ethical questions raised by border externalization. I also was fortunate enough to help out with BU’s Border Studies Program in Texas last spring, and was an inaugural fellow in the CFD’s new summer fellowship program. And of course I spend a lot of time pursuing my own research, which at this point mostly consists in completing the dissertation project I described above.
Lastly, I spend a fair amount of time trying to goad the rest of the center into impromptu games of hallway basketball using the giant exercise ball in Chrissy’s office. Alas, no takers yet.
CFD Team: What inspires you about this work?
The people, of course. Thinking seriously about forced displacement is often dispiriting — the scope of the crises is massive (and growing), the forces that engender them are structural, and the barely conscionable status quo has become deeply intractable. But if you look at the people, there is always a glimmer of hope. I just finished working on a project about hope and displacement, which ended up bring primarily about deaths of despair in asylum detention facilities, but at the same time, about the unimaginable lengths people will go to ensure those they love have a shot at a better life, and the way that hope sustains them along the way. That people are able to maintain hope in the face of so much suffering can’t help but fill you with hope yourself.
CFD Team: What drew you to this position?
The opportunity to work with a group of people committed to thinking seriously about this issue from so many different angles, and eager to make those vital connections between academia, activism, and art that make our world a bit more habitable, a bit more hospitable.
CFD Team: Tell us about some of your passions and hobbies outside of academia. What makes you you?
I’m not always sure I am me! But that’s another matter I suppose. As for hobbies, I love rock climbing, throwing a frisbee to my dog, cooking for friends and family, and tinkering in various media — I rarely have the time any more, but when I do I carve spoons and bowls out of tree branches and make furniture from reclaimed wood. It’s a good way to do something productive with your hands while listening to good music.