{"id":118309,"date":"2020-01-16T15:14:39","date_gmt":"2020-01-16T22:14:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/?p=118309"},"modified":"2020-02-17T16:35:24","modified_gmt":"2020-02-17T23:35:24","slug":"uccs-researchers-highlight-changed-perceptions-of-refugees-over-past-100-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/?p=118309","title":{"rendered":"UCCS researchers highlight changed perceptions of refugees over past 100 years"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a>
Two young Burmese refugees living in a remote camp in the mountains of Thailand smile at each other over breakfast. Photo courtesy of Isaiah Rustad, Unsplash.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Emily Skop, professor and chair of the Department of\nGeography and Environmental Studies, has been thinking about refugee issues\nsince the seventh grade. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a research passion that isn\u2019t going away anytime soon. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On top of her courseload at UCCS, Skop has spent the last two years co-editing and contributing research to the 109th<\/sup> edition of \u201cGeographical Review\u201d \u2013 a special issue of the journal, released in Oct. 2019, that published brand-new scholarly works on refugee issues from an international cohort of researchers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Skop didn\u2019t do it alone. She brought Master’s of Applied Geography alumna Arielle Cassiday ’18 and Joel Tonyan, systems and user experience librarian, along for the ride.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Emily Skop, professor and chair of the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at UCCS.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Together, the three researchers conducted a bibliometric analysis of 100 years of peer-reviewed articles published in the journal. Their goal was to explore how the language surrounding refugee issues has changed over the past century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By analyzing articles beginning at the time of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference following World War I, Skop, Cassiday and Tonyan found that the language used around refugee issues has shifted from words evoking physical landscapes such as \u201criver\u201d and \u201clake\u201d to geopolitical terms such as \u201csocial,\u201d \u201cethnic,\u201d \u201ccommunity,\u201d \u201ccultural\u201d and \u201cpolitical.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, Skop explained, as international communities began to feel an obligation to surveil and manage the movements of people across the globe after World War I, the language around refugees became politicized. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And to Skop, this points to one of the publication’s key research findings: that the language used to describe refugees and the labels used to categorize them can have life-changing effects. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not all of them are good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOne of the pieces in the issue uses [refugeeism in] Berlin as a case study,\u201d Skop said. \u201cIt talks about how resettlement agencies and civil society actors label refugees as either \u2018good\u2019 or \u2018bad.\u2019 The perceived \u2018goodness\u2019 of the refugee equates to how well they will be treated.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other research in the issue points to the ways that refugees\nare dehumanized and disempowered, even by the very countries that offer them asylum.\nSkop highlights that changes to international laws over the past century have fundamentally\nshaped the way that refugees are treated \u2013 for better and for worse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf I could point to one key takeaway [from the research],\u201d Skop said, \u201cI would want people to know that we should be thinking about linking the political and human rights issues at borders today to some of the legacies of foreign and domestic policies enacted since World War I. People should know that when decision-making happens, even at a global scale, it has a local impact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
The 109th issue of “Geographical Review,” co-edited by Skop, is a special edition on refugeeism.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe keep trying to enact technological fixes for refugees,\u201d she continued. \u201cThe technological fix in 1919 was to make international borders more real, and make these labels mean something. But they resulted in millions of unintended, often negative outcomes, particularly for displaced persons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf you don\u2019t talk to the people impacted themselves, and\nbring them to the table when you make these policy decisions and technological\nfixes \u2013 if you ignore the voices of those impacted \u2013 you will keep running into\nnegative outcomes. You won\u2019t get the resolutions you\u2019re seeking. So humanize\nthese issues.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Skop\u2019s work on refugeeism isn\u2019t going anywhere. She has begun writing an upper-division textbook on refugees, as well as working on funded research that will explore urban refugeeism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the 109th<\/sup> issue of \u201cGeographical Review\u201d\nremains meaningful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOne of my goals as a more \u2018senior\u2019 scholar is to bring early-career scholars, like Joel and Arielle, into my work as much as possible,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI have special-edited an edition of a journal before, but this one was especially inspiring. We were very fortunate to get an interesting group of international collaborators to write up pieces based on their own research. We brought in a lot of new faculty and early-career researchers. We were able to really highlight their work on refugees, and give it \u2013 and them \u2013 a new platform.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The special issue of \u201cGeographical Review\u201d can be accessed online<\/a>.\nIt was co-edited by Skop and the University of West Virginia\u2019s Karen Culcasi.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Emily Skop, professor and chair of the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, recently collaborated with alumna Arielle Cassiday ’18 and librarian Joel Tonyan on research surrounding the language used to describe refugeeism over the past 100 years. (More)<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":118320,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1,9],"tags":[53,86,111,127,302,329],"class_list":["post-118309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all","category-personnel","tag-academic-affairs","tag-college-of-letters-arts-and-sciences","tag-department-of-geography-and-environmental-studies","tag-kraemer-family-library","tag-office-of-research","tag-research"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/Skop-Banner-1.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1mBpJ-uMd","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=118309"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":118341,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118309\/revisions\/118341"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/118320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=118309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=118309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=118309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}