A Hope More Powerful than the Sea by Melissa Fleming recounts the courageous and often jaw-droppi... more A Hope More Powerful than the Sea by Melissa Fleming recounts the courageous and often jaw-dropping journey of Doaa Al Zamel's flight from persecution in war-torn Syria to resettlement in Sweden. In harrowing detail, the story brings to life the plight of refugees forced from their homeland and into the uncertainty and violence that constitute the liminal space of stateless communities, and the resiliency required for their survival. The book begins in the comfort of six-year-old Doaa's home in Dara'a near the Jordanian border. From playing with her cousins in the courtyard to observing aunts chide her mother for bearing only daughters, it is a childhood punctuated by the joys and squabbles of extended family life. By 2011, the familiar rhythms of Doaa's days attending school and gossiping with friends on the rooftop are ruptured when tanks, helicopters and soldiers descend on the city. The Arab Spring had arrived in Syria; however, initial hopes for regime change and progressive reform are crushed by President Bashar al-Assad's oppressive and indiscriminate response to opposition, which includes abduction, torture and rape. Having lost his livelihood and desperate to protect his family, Doaa's father makes the anguished decision to flee their homeland, a decision she likens to 'taking my soul away' (81). The family arrives in Egypt only to encounter more persecution as a tide of anti-refugee sentiment sweeps the country. Under constant threat of violence, Doaa, now 19 and engaged to Bassem, makes the gut-wrenching decision to accompany her fiancé on the treacherous journey across the Mediterranean in search of a better life in Sweden. The young couple endures detention centres and the cruelty of merciless smugglers before their dilapidated trawler capsizes. All but a handful of the 500 refugees crammed onboard are swallowed by the sea, including approximately 100 children and Doaa's beloved Bassem. Doaa manages to cling to her own life and that of two small children for an interminable four days before being rescued by a passing These reports are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license as part of Berghahn Open Anthro, a subscribe-to-open model for APC-free open access made possible by the journal's subscribers.
This article explores the implications of the Making Home Project, a participatory audiovisual me... more This article explores the implications of the Making Home Project, a participatory audiovisual media project with migrant and refugee youth in Iran. This project does not picture the faces of youth as they express caring relationships and attachments to the people and places within the migrant neighborhoods where they reside-places locally characterized as poor, dangerous, and transient. I examine the audio, the visual and the off-screen encounters of this participatory production to demonstrate how media outcomes are shaped by Afghan youth's differently situated refugee experiences in Iran. Ultimately, I argue that space and place are actualized through the embodied act of youth expressing and producing audiovisual media about their homeplace.
A Hope More Powerful than the Sea by Melissa Fleming recounts the courageous and often jaw-droppi... more A Hope More Powerful than the Sea by Melissa Fleming recounts the courageous and often jaw-dropping journey of Doaa Al Zamel's flight from persecution in war-torn Syria to resettlement in Sweden. In harrowing detail, the story brings to life the plight of refugees forced from their homeland and into the uncertainty and violence that constitute the liminal space of stateless communities, and the resiliency required for their survival. The book begins in the comfort of six-year-old Doaa's home in Dara'a near the Jordanian border. From playing with her cousins in the courtyard to observing aunts chide her mother for bearing only daughters, it is a childhood punctuated by the joys and squabbles of extended family life. By 2011, the familiar rhythms of Doaa's days attending school and gossiping with friends on the rooftop are ruptured when tanks, helicopters and soldiers descend on the city. The Arab Spring had arrived in Syria; however, initial hopes for regime change and progressive reform are crushed by President Bashar al-Assad's oppressive and indiscriminate response to opposition, which includes abduction, torture and rape. Having lost his livelihood and desperate to protect his family, Doaa's father makes the anguished decision to flee their homeland, a decision she likens to 'taking my soul away' (81). The family arrives in Egypt only to encounter more persecution as a tide of anti-refugee sentiment sweeps the country. Under constant threat of violence, Doaa, now 19 and engaged to Bassem, makes the gut-wrenching decision to accompany her fiancé on the treacherous journey across the Mediterranean in search of a better life in Sweden. The young couple endures detention centres and the cruelty of merciless smugglers before their dilapidated trawler capsizes. All but a handful of the 500 refugees crammed onboard are swallowed by the sea, including approximately 100 children and Doaa's beloved Bassem. Doaa manages to cling to her own life and that of two small children for an interminable four days before being rescued by a passing These reports are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license as part of Berghahn Open Anthro, a subscribe-to-open model for APC-free open access made possible by the journal's subscribers.
This article explores the implications of the Making Home Project, a participatory audiovisual me... more This article explores the implications of the Making Home Project, a participatory audiovisual media project with migrant and refugee youth in Iran. This project does not picture the faces of youth as they express caring relationships and attachments to the people and places within the migrant neighborhoods where they reside-places locally characterized as poor, dangerous, and transient. I examine the audio, the visual and the off-screen encounters of this participatory production to demonstrate how media outcomes are shaped by Afghan youth's differently situated refugee experiences in Iran. Ultimately, I argue that space and place are actualized through the embodied act of youth expressing and producing audiovisual media about their homeplace.
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