Michelle Munyikwa
University of Pennsylvania, Internal Medicine, Department Member
- Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Pediatrics, Department MemberUniversity of Pennsylvania, Anthropology, Graduate Studentadd
- Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, Queer Theory, Black feminism, Embodiment, Health and Human Rights, and 18 moreEthnography, STS (Anthropology), African Studies, Refugee Studies, Forced Migration, Migration Studies, Speculative Fiction, Human Rights, Science Fiction, Queer of Color Critique, Transnational Feminism, Postcolonial Studies, Critical Theory, Critical Medical Anthropology, Urban Anthropology, Space and Place, Critical Race Theory, and Refugeesedit
- I'm currently a student in the joint MD/PhD program in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. I found my research by accident; actually, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the work found me. I started working with refugees and asylum seekers at a critical moment when Black Lives Matter and the Syrian refugee crisis dominated the news. I bega... moreI'm currently a student in the joint MD/PhD program in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.
I found my research by accident; actually, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the work found me. I started working with refugees and asylum seekers at a critical moment when Black Lives Matter and the Syrian refugee crisis dominated the news. I began to wonder what it means to provide care – social services, health care, employment assistance, community therapy – in a city like Philadelphia at a time when race, citizenship, and belonging are such a large part of the national imaginary, especially as ultra right-wing movements gained prominence across Europe and in the United States. I wanted to know what it would look like to place the care of refugees in the context of broader patterns of racial discrimination and state-sanctioned violence.
Responding to that, my current research explores the intersection of care and governance in Philadelphia through the lens of displacement, beginning with an ethnographic study of refugees and the institutions in Philadelphia that serve them. I analyze Philadelphia as a place formed through migration and displacement, from successive refugee migrations beginning in the 20th century to other movements, like the Great Migration, that have shaped demographic patterns and social life in the city of Brotherly Love. Drawing from a large, diverse archive that brings news, personal narratives and oral histories, and cultural representations both past and present into conversation with semi-structured interviews and ethnographic participant-observation at multiple sites, my work strives to understand what making refuge looks like and for whom asylum is possible.
My analytic framework draws from literatures about humanitarianism, affect, and the anthropology of the state to understand how refugee resettlement in Philadelphia is inflected with the politics of race, gender, and class. Drawing from feminist theory and queer of color critique, I analyze comparative racialization through a framework that recognizes how that groups are racialized with respect to one another through competing racial formations at the same time that it accounts for heterogeneity within racial categories. I do so through a particular attentiveness to state bureaucratic processes, from welfare applications to public health management, as they are negotiated by healthcare providers, case workers, and volunteers, not to mention refugees and asylum seekers themselves.
As a Black woman, an immigrant, and a future health care provider, I hope to think carefully about the social, political, and economic dynamics that care – however well-intentioned – both shapes and is shaped by. I’m also hopeful that in theorizing displacement and refuge, we can reconsider what justice can and should look like. Thinking as such might allow us to imagine a reparative politics that offers new possibilities for configuring livable lives.edit
In early September of 2015, Black American citizen Kyle Lydell Canty crossed the US border into British Columbia, Canada. While he told border agents that he intended to make a short trip to take pictures, his true intent was quite... more
In early September of 2015, Black American citizen Kyle Lydell Canty crossed the US border into British Columbia, Canada. While he told border agents that he intended to make a short trip to take pictures, his true intent was quite different. On September 23, he filed for asylum in Vancouver, armed with 18 pieces of evidence that, in his words, represent the United States' history of racial discrimination and state-sanctioned violence against Blacks from a “human rights perspective”. In a recent Huffington Post article, he stated: "We were brought to America as slaves, and the country hasn’t changed its ways at all since then…. If you’re black in the US you will always have to go through persecution and discrimination at some point in your life." As he reported to the Immigration Review Board, his fear for his life because of his blackness constitutes a “well-founded fear” according to international law, and thus he is applying for asylum, a claim that is notable because it is exceedingly rare for Americans to be granted asylum elsewhere. Canty’s declaration rejects the notion of human rights violations as phenomena that occur ‘elsewhere,’ placing them squarely on American soil. In January 2016, the Immigration Review Board denied Canty’s application, based on the idea that Canty, while having credible fear, could not prove that the levels of harassment he faced rose to the level of persecution.
In this paper, I suggest that Kyle Canty’s case is representative of an increasingly common linkage made between American Blackness and refugee status. This comparison – mobilized as a political statement – brings to mind questions about what counts as an event, issues of violence both exceptional and ordinary, the role of comparison in politics and critique, and dreams of the otherwise and their linkage to political recognition. Drawing upon these themes, I ask what kinds of openings the case of Canty affords. What kind of action was his border crossing and subsequent public declaration? And what does thinking this case - and the connection between blackness and refuge more generally - afford us theoretically and politically? Ultimately, I suggest that Canty’s border crossing forces the unthinkable because it requires that we consider Black American suffering to be exceptional - to be unacceptable - even given that Black suffering typically “figures in the domain of the mundane” and thus “refuses the idiom of exception”.
Presented at the New School for Social Research Graduate Conference on the Theme "Refuge"
In this paper, I suggest that Kyle Canty’s case is representative of an increasingly common linkage made between American Blackness and refugee status. This comparison – mobilized as a political statement – brings to mind questions about what counts as an event, issues of violence both exceptional and ordinary, the role of comparison in politics and critique, and dreams of the otherwise and their linkage to political recognition. Drawing upon these themes, I ask what kinds of openings the case of Canty affords. What kind of action was his border crossing and subsequent public declaration? And what does thinking this case - and the connection between blackness and refuge more generally - afford us theoretically and politically? Ultimately, I suggest that Canty’s border crossing forces the unthinkable because it requires that we consider Black American suffering to be exceptional - to be unacceptable - even given that Black suffering typically “figures in the domain of the mundane” and thus “refuses the idiom of exception”.
Presented at the New School for Social Research Graduate Conference on the Theme "Refuge"
Research Interests:
The idea that we could possibly go somewhere that exists only in our imaginations - that is, “nowhere” - is the classic definition of utopia. Call me utopian, but I inherited my mother’s belief that the map to a new world is in the... more
The idea that we could possibly go somewhere that exists only in our imaginations - that is, “nowhere” - is the classic definition of utopia. Call me utopian, but I inherited my mother’s belief that the map to a new world is in the imagination, in what we see in our third eyes rather than in the desolation that surrounds us.
- Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams
What does it look like for us to dream? In Freedom Dreams, his expansive history of the Black radical tradition, Kelley writes of the “cognitive maps of the future” that allow us to imagine the world not only as it is, but as it could be: what he calls “the world not yet born” (10). Following Kelley, along with Ruha Benjamin and Alondra Nelson, I utilize the imagination as a critical tool we have for configuring alternative worlds and conjuring solutions to those problems which threaten to make our world uninhabitable. In doing so, I draw from speculative narratives, both fictional and real, that utilize movement as a way of highlighting both social inequalities and alternative possibilities. In particular, I read narratives that might be called postcolonial, Afrofuturist, or cyberfeminist, stories that employ speculation as a mode that interrogates histories of scientific racism and imperialism, contests structural inequalities, and pushes back against the relegation of racialized, colonized Others to a static, immobile past. In this paper, I draw from recent novels The Windup Girl, The Girl in the Road, and The Underground Railroad, as well as present-day migratory narratives and legal cases, to build the notion of refuge as a conceptual tool for thinking the Anthropocene. In other words, I ask: how does an attention to refuge and its inequalities illuminate our social world and help us build those to come? For social scientists and humanists invested in the world-as-it-is, how can we utilize speculative narratives as a way to sharpen our attention to the ways that individuals, through their own imaginings of home, belonging, and refuge, re-articulate the bounds of citizenship and belonging and construct their own sense of freedom? How might thinking refuge as a keyword for the Anthropocene bring us to a clearer understanding of those strivings to survive which have been referred to as “freedom dreams,” (Kelley 2002), “renegade dreams” (Ralph 2014), “endurance,” and “the will to be otherwise” (Povinelli 2012, 2011)? In thinking refuge, then, I call attention to an ordinary politics “rooted in desire” (Kelly 2002, 6): the desire for home, for belonging, and for safety and wellbeing that a space of refuge would allow.
- Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams
What does it look like for us to dream? In Freedom Dreams, his expansive history of the Black radical tradition, Kelley writes of the “cognitive maps of the future” that allow us to imagine the world not only as it is, but as it could be: what he calls “the world not yet born” (10). Following Kelley, along with Ruha Benjamin and Alondra Nelson, I utilize the imagination as a critical tool we have for configuring alternative worlds and conjuring solutions to those problems which threaten to make our world uninhabitable. In doing so, I draw from speculative narratives, both fictional and real, that utilize movement as a way of highlighting both social inequalities and alternative possibilities. In particular, I read narratives that might be called postcolonial, Afrofuturist, or cyberfeminist, stories that employ speculation as a mode that interrogates histories of scientific racism and imperialism, contests structural inequalities, and pushes back against the relegation of racialized, colonized Others to a static, immobile past. In this paper, I draw from recent novels The Windup Girl, The Girl in the Road, and The Underground Railroad, as well as present-day migratory narratives and legal cases, to build the notion of refuge as a conceptual tool for thinking the Anthropocene. In other words, I ask: how does an attention to refuge and its inequalities illuminate our social world and help us build those to come? For social scientists and humanists invested in the world-as-it-is, how can we utilize speculative narratives as a way to sharpen our attention to the ways that individuals, through their own imaginings of home, belonging, and refuge, re-articulate the bounds of citizenship and belonging and construct their own sense of freedom? How might thinking refuge as a keyword for the Anthropocene bring us to a clearer understanding of those strivings to survive which have been referred to as “freedom dreams,” (Kelley 2002), “renegade dreams” (Ralph 2014), “endurance,” and “the will to be otherwise” (Povinelli 2012, 2011)? In thinking refuge, then, I call attention to an ordinary politics “rooted in desire” (Kelly 2002, 6): the desire for home, for belonging, and for safety and wellbeing that a space of refuge would allow.