Dr. Amanda Poole, Professor of Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, Geospatial and Earth Sciences, recently participated in the 66th African Studies Association (ASA) Annual Meeting, held in Chicago, Illinois, from December 12–14, 2024. The ASA Annual Meeting, the largest gathering of Africanist scholars in the world, is the flagship event of the association and brought together over 2,000 scholars and professionals under the theme Global Africa.
Dr. Poole co-led a session on Thursday, December 12, titled Author Meets Critic: Hosting States and Unsettled Guests: Eritrean Refugees in a Time of Migration Deterrence. The session was chaired by Dr. Lahra Smith of Georgetown University, who unfortunately could not be in attendance, and included discussants Sabine Mohamed (Johns Hopkins University), Dan Connell (Boston University), and Awet Weldemichael (Queen’s University, Canada).
The session focused on Poole’s recently published book Hosting States and Unsettled Guests: Eritrean Refugees in a Time of Migration Deterrence, co-authored by Dr. Jennifer Riggan of Arcadia University. Drawing from ethnographic research in northern Ethiopia and Addis Ababa, this ethnography explores how Eritrean refugees navigate the tensions between policies promising local integration and the realities of instability and conflict.
The book contributes key insights to forced migration studies, East African studies, and anthropology by shifting the focus of refugee studies from Europe to regions in the Global South, where emerging forms of migration deterrence are increasingly shaping refugee experiences.
For more information about Hosting States and Unsettled Guests, visit https://iupress.org/9780253067999/hosting-states-and-unsettled-guests/