2026 Annual Conference

How might personal smartphone photographs, when re-materialised as a collective archive, foster solidarity and address power relations in the ways migration narratives are recorded and remembered?

In this 90-minute multisensory workshop, you will create a SIM-scale photographic pendant from a chosen image on your smartphone using a 3D-printed camera and a miniature darkroom. Each person will make one to keep and one to add to a collective archive, which was recently exhibited at the V&A, London.

Through co-designed workshops across nine countries—from Cyprus to Morocco, the UK to Mexico—smartphone SIM cards emerged as symbols of mobile belonging and agency for people experiencing displacement (Hingley, 2022). Founder of The SIM Project, artist and anthropologist Liz Hingley, will share the project’s participatory research methodology that frames smartphone images and sounds as living archives of belonging and radical sites of solidarity.

Collective Healing through Dance: Dabke as ‘Sumud’, Resistance and Community Building in Displaced Populations

Facilitator: Sima Bou Jawde

Throughout history of movement, whether voluntary or forced, populations have cultivated traditions to build heritage and preserve their cultural identity as a form of survival, belonging and collective identity. As Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians experience displacement through global and state-sanctioned violence, Dabke—a folkloric community line dance deeply rooted in indigenous land—has remained a key feature of displaced communities highlighting humanity and collectivity. In this workshop, a brief history and introduction of Dabke will be shared, followed by an interactive workshop. Through this hands-on workshop, participants will gain theoretical knowledge of Dabke, and a deep sense of healing, community and belonging as experienced by Dabke and as practiced globally across displaced communities.

Releasing your Voice (Pre-Registration Required)

Facilitator: Stacy Mattingly

In a time of wars, migration, forced displacement, and global instability, we may feel at a loss when considering how to respond. The scale and unpredictability of the impacts on people and societies can leave us unclear about ways to meaningfully contribute. One response is to write—to reach for insights, wisdom, and approaches to thinking we may not realize belong to us. Writing is discovery. A personal space where we can grapple with what we struggle to articulate and a way to engage. In releasing our voices, we can extend ourselves to readers, who may enter their own conversation with our ideas and carry them still further. But voice encompasses more than message. In the context of forced displacement, a writer’s voice may hold within it trauma and tensions over identity, belonging, language, memory, home. We might say voice contains everything from words, style, and sentences to the ways we see, process, associate, and develop a narrative, a line of thought, an argument. Voice emanates from who we are, from our character and life. To release our voice is to make a contribution that we alone can make. Our work, then, is to access more of the tools at our disposal and enlarge our capacity to both discover our material and tell our stories. In this creative writing workshop, we will examine literary texts that wrestle with experiences of wartime, forced displacement, migration, and aftermath. We will encounter voices that both emerge from the immediacy of crisis and reflect on it. We’ll consider narrative’s unique ability to open up the depths, nuances, and complexities of human experience. Through writing prompts, we’ll explore facets of voice, including tone, style, and structure. We’ll use self-translation exercises, moving our work across linguistic and/or stylistic borders, to tap into more of our voice. Our aim is to find new avenues into our material and acquire skills to release our voices with a resonance that can elevate our shared humanity. Ultimately, you will take away writing tools you might further develop to express yourself and connect with the readers you reach.

Health is one important frontrunner of AI and tech applications, with potential for enhanced disease diagnostics, streamlined healthcare delivery, and improved access to medical information. However, ethical concerns, data privacy, and the possibility of deepening inequalities are significant risks for displaced persons. Discussion of opportunities and challenges for the sector is critically important and requires interdisciplinary consideration. This panel will explore the intersection of health, technology, and displacement, bringing together practitioners and researchers for an open dialogue about technology, focusing on emerging digital tools in a changing socio-political and funding landscape.

Civil Networks

Speakers: Roch Dunin-Wąsowicz, Andrii Galkin, Muhammed Zeyn

Moderator: Maryam Khalil

Due to government and business priorities and profits, forced displacement and war contexts are often neglected and deprioritized. Civil society fills these gaps, whether through informal groups, NGO structures, academia, the media, social movements, or faith-based communities. This panel hopes to explore 1) how civil society uses commercial tech to further their goals (i.e Andri’s data on mobile alerting apps and telegram and Muhammed’s investigation of social media use and narrative and Roch’s thoughts on digital 2) how civil societies navigates members positionalities (i.e Muhammad’s remarks on material realities constraining symbolic transformations and Roch’s thoughts on how translocal civic ecosystems combat solidarity fatigue more generally, 3) how civil society both negatively and positively shapes displacement and war contexts.

The panelist’s research focuses on city infrastructure, online identity formation, and transnational solidarity networks. The panel will navigate how communities organize under conditions of crisis, how trust and narratives shape collective action, and how diverse actors—from activists to entrepreneurs—contribute to resilient civic ecosystems in times of war and displacement.

Works and Process: Micro Book Talks

Speakers: Nancy Hiemstra, Karen Jacobsen, Alejandro Olayo-Méndez, Carrie Preston

Moderator: Selma Hedlund

This panel brings together scholars with recently published books that explore how migration is reshaping communities, institutions, and everyday life across borders. From Host Cities: How Refugees Are Transforming the World’s Urban Settings by Karen Jacobsen, which examines the dynamic role of refugees in urban environments, to Immigration Detention, Inc. by Nancy Hiemstra, an analysis of the expansion of detention systems, the panel highlights critical dimensions of contemporary migration governance. Alejandro Olayo-Méndez’s Humanitarianism from Below: Faith, Welfare, and the Role of Casas de Migrantes in Mexico centers grassroots and faith-based responses to migrant needs, while CFD’s own Carrie Preston and Marina Lazetic’s Border Lives and Works explores the lived experiences and creative expressions emerging from border spaces. Together, these works offer a multifaceted look at movements, power, and resilience in today’s landscape of migration and displacement.

Deportation and Detention

Speakers: Nancy Hiemstra, Daniel Kanstroom, Jaya Savita

Moderators: Cemile Gizem Dinçer, Micah Trautmann

This panel will explore from both a scholarly and practitioner perspective the current deportation and migration detention regimes in the United States. Examining the politics, law, economics, and tactics of resistance to immigrant removal and incarceration, we will try to make sense of this historical moment, analyze the structures in which these practices are embedded, and examine strategies of solidarity and subversion.

Featured Displays

Short Film: “24 Hours Local”

Artist: Hamza Matayaqubov

24 Hours Local is a 15-minute short film that follows Saad, an undocumented Syrian boy, as he
arrives in Athens searching for a better life. Within one day, he loses everything: his money, his
belongings, and his sense of hope. As he struggles to survive on the margins of the city, Saad begins
collecting bottles to repay a threatening smuggler. The film unfolds over a single day, capturing both
the fragility and resilience of displaced youth.

Understanding Challenges and Opportunities in Neurological Treatment among Resettled Refugees: A Photovoice Approach

Authors: Maab Karrar, Lana Sabbah, Ola Alani, Hiwot Weldemariam, Yusef AlMolieh, Sarah Brewer, and Altaf Saadi

The number of forcibly displaced individuals worldwide has reached record levels due to ongoing wars and human rights violations. Due to experiences of trauma, like torture and interpersonal violence, they have greater vulnerability to poor health outcomes, including neurological conditions. Among U.S.-resettled refugees, the most common neurological conditions are headache disorders, traumatic brain injury, and sleep disorders. This study explores U.S.-resettled refugees’ experiences with these conditions to inform adaptation of existing interventions to meet the needs of refugee patient communities.