CRS Seminar: Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential

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Guest speaker: Heba Gowayed, Assistant Professor, Boston University

Drawing on a global and comparative ethnography, this presentation explores how Syrian men and women seeking refuge in a moment of unprecedented global displacement are received by countries of resettlement and asylum—the U.S., Canada, and Germany. It shows that human capital, typically examined as the skills immigrants bring with them that shape their potential, is actually created, transformed, or destroyed by receiving states’ incorporation policies. Since these policies derive from historically informed and unequal approaches to social welfare, refugees’ experiences raise a mirror to how states (re)produce inequality.

Heba Gowayed is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston University.

Her research, which is global and comparative, examines how low-income people traverse social services, immigration laws, and their associated bureaucracies, while grappling with gender and racial inequalities. Gowayed is author of Refuge, published with Princeton University Press, which explores how states shape the potential of people pursuing refuge within their borders. She is currently working on her second book, The Cost of Borders, which theorizes borders as a costly, and often deadly, transaction.