Acknowledgements

This volume aims to explore both the dehumanizing discourses, policies, and structural forces that impact refugees and the ways that refugees and their allies contest these. In undertaking this aim, we utilize a transdisciplinary approach that brings together academics, practitioners, and those who have experienced being coded as “refugees.” In pursuing this aim and producing this transdisciplinary volume, we have many organizations and people to thank.

From Athabasca University Press, we are exceptionally grateful to Pamela Holway for her time, her guidance, and her always thoughtful support. From the very start, Pamela was enthusiastic to potentiate the ideas that emerged in this volume, and we also thank the anonymous reviewers who provided constructive and helpful comments on our work. We are so pleased to have worked with Athabasca University Press and to have this book be open access, as opposed to guarded behind a paywall.

This volume is an outgrowth of a specialized workshop entitled “Ethics, Rights, Culture and the Humanization of Refugees” held at the University of Alberta on February 6–8, 2020, in conjunction with International Week. From the University of Alberta International–Global Education, we were delighted to have the support of and work with Nancy Hannemann and Carrie Malloy on the 2020 International Week (an annual educational event devoted to understanding and finding solutions to global issues). From the Faculty of Arts, we also thank the events manager Cindy Welsh for her expert backing during our workshop.

For direct financial support, we thank the Kule Institute for Advanced Study (and its former director Geoffrey Rockwell). We are grateful to several units at the University of Alberta for their generosity: the Faculty of Arts and the Arts Conference Fund, the Faculty of Education for providing a Conference Fund and a venue for the workshop, and the Faculty of Science (and Sandeep Agarwal in particular). A big thank you to the Department of Music and the Canadian Center for Ethnomusicology. We also acknowledge, with appreciation, the Canada Research Chairs Program and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

We extend our deepest appreciation to Elder Stanley Peltier for holding a welcoming smudging ceremony at the opening of the workshop and reminding us of our responsibilities as settlers on the ancestral, traditional, and unceded territory of Treaty 6, the Métis homelands, Region 4. This is a gathering place that encompasses seventeen First Nations in central Alberta, including the Dene Suliné, Cree, Nakota Sioux, and Saulteaux peoples whose living languages, histories, and cultures impact and influence the diverse personal and professional communities in which the University of Alberta is located and where many of the workshop’s participants live and work. His welcoming words of wisdom to the workshop’s participants guided our two-day work.

We were very fortunate to have dedicated support for our work at different junctures. We thank University of Alberta PhD student Nariya Khasanova for her expert research assistance. We also thank Dr. Salina Abji for her expert editorial assistance.

Not least, we are very indebted to our contributors. For many of us, the February 2020 workshop and “Transpositions” concert (a recording of which can be linked to through this volume) were the last major “in-person” events we attended before the declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic by the World Health Organization and the lockdown measures that followed. That we were able to meet was a gift. The restrictions and border closures that followed stood as reminders that openness to human mobility is not a given, and this profoundly impacts refugees.

We thank all our contributors for meeting deadlines and illuminating the challenges and resistances to the dehumanization of refugees.

Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Michael Frishkopf, Reza Hasmath, and Anna Kirova