Reflections on CFD presentation at ISA Conference by Associate Director Carrie J. Preston
Our presentation at the International Studies Association Annual Conference in San Francisco was very well received, and we learned a ton that will advance this research. Participants in our panel were particularly interested in how we reframed our work away from “experiential learning” or “field work” (the term most often used in International Studies) to “learning through engagement with complex systems.” As I explained in the presentation, Boston University’s Center on Forced Displacement has introduced interdisciplinary courses and programs that we called, even when we wrote the abstract for the ISA panel, “experiential learning programs” addressing the challenges of forced displacement. As we have come to understand the need to focus less on “experiences,” either those of the students or those of displaced people with whom we may or may not interact, we arrived at the more accurate term learning through engagement with complex systems. We define learning through engagement with complex systems as a process in which we travel with students to spaces where forcibly displaced individuals encounter host communities, organizations, and institutions including NGOs, border and immigration enforcement agencies, and various state/federal institutions. We learn by having a series of discussions with direct service providers about their work and then volunteering with their organization. We support them in whichever ways they need us in that moment, which might be picking up water bottles from Sam’s Club for Team Brownsville or passing them out to a busload of migrants just released from detention. We also interact with local researchers and students in academic settings, at local universities, and informally with members of host communities, all of whom are impacted more directly and personally than our faculty and students at Boston University. We recognize the complexity and complicity of being a participant in the (very much broken) humanitarian-industrial complex, and we constantly analyze our work through a critical ethical lens that pushes us to a better understanding of how different constituents are addressing challenges of forced displacement, sometimes undermining each other, and bringing many different, sometimes incoherent, perspectives and motivations to their work.
Our ISA presentation and the paper we are writing, builds upon experiences offering programs on forced displacement in Beirut, Lebanon (2018, 2019, 2020), Kampala, Uganda (2019), Brownsville and McAllen, Texas (2022, 2023), and Belgrade, Serbia (2023, 2024). We hypothesize that multi-disciplinary travel programs studying forced displacement provide a unique opportunity for undergraduate learning through engagement with complex systems. These programs also provide ample opportunity for mistakes of all kinds. We engage our own mistakes as well as the humanitarian systems in which we participate with a critical ethical lens and we have revised our programs accordingly. Our research seeks to measure student learning in our programs by coding student surveys administered before and after the program, analyzing application materials, assessing our programs with collaborators from NGOs and local universities, and directly engaging our students and alumni as partners in research. With great responses from participants and respondents at the conference in San Francisco, we are excited to finish the project and write the paper this summer.