Agrarian Studies Colloquium: China Sajadian "Debts of Displacement: The Paradoxes of Patronage in a Syrian Refugee Farmworker Camp"

The core of the Agrarian Studies Program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium.

This topic embraces, inter alia, the study of mutual perceptions between countryside and city, and patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them.

It also includes an understanding of how different societies conceive of the spatial order they exhibit. What terms are meaningful and how are they related?: e.g., frontier, wilderness, arable, countryside, city, town, agriculture, commerce, “hills,” lowlands, maritime districts, inland. How have these meanings changed historically and what symbolic and material weight do they bear?

Meetings are Fridays, 11am -1pm Eastern Time.

Meetings will be held in a hybrid format, both on Zoom and in-person at 230 Prospect Street, Room 101.

--------------------------------------------

Bridging migration studies, agrarian studies, and economic anthropology, China Sajadian’s research broadly examines links between histories of displacement and contemporary conflicts over land and labor in the Middle East. Her current book project, Debts of Displacement, is based on nearly two years of ethnographic fieldwork with Syrian and Lebanese agriculturalists at the Lebanese-Syrian border. In contrast to the conventional idea of refugee exile as one linked to an originary event of traumatic uprooting by war or disaster, Debts of Displacement argues that Syrian farmworkers’ displacement is part of a much longer history of how debt configures agrarian labor mobility: a multi-generational and ongoing predicament rooted in uneven agrarian development, crises of household provisioning, and gendered labor obligations on both sides of the border. By examining the distinctly agrarian conditions of Syrian farmworkers’ displacement from a feminist perspective, her research challenges the distinction between “involuntary” refugees and “voluntary” labor migrants, as well as the idea of a refugee crisis itself.