The Afterlives of Return and the Limits of Refugee Protection | Annual Elizabeth Colson Lecture 2021
Professor Heath Cabot (University of Pittsburgh)
Wednesday, 12 May 2021, 3pm to 4.30pm
Zoom webinar
Hosted by Refugee Studies Centre
About the lecture
This talk centres on a long-term refugee in Greece who decided to return to his home country in the face of severe illness. I ask what his illness and treatment in Greece, and ultimately his return, reveal about protection regimes: as he sought care, respite from pain, and a good—or at least dignified—death. His return enabled him to be among family again, in once-familiar places, and to be laid to rest among ancestors. Yet rather than reading his return as a form of closure or resolution, I probe its afterlives: the frayed, tangled, still-unfurling edges of the story, which speak to the ongoing nature of displacement.
About the speaker
Heath Cabot teaches anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh and is currently a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. She is the author of On the Doorstep of Europe: Asylum and Citizenship in Greece (Penn Press 2014). She is currently working on a book on grass-roots healthcare initiatives in Greece.
Video
This lecture is now available to watch on YouTube.