(Re)Centering Midwest Refugee Resettlement and Home

Dear Colleagues,

“Middle” is a vague concept, connoting in-betweenness. It can refer, for example, to territory, time period, birth order, space, or socioeconomic status. Center, on the other hand, is more precise and active: to center is to foreground or emphasize. This Special Issue seeks to center the lives of refugees in the Midwest in order to better understand experiences of exile in this vast region and provide a counternarrative to the dominant portrayal of refugees as overly dependent or agential and the Midwest as primarily rural or white. We also seek to recenter the Midwest as part of a larger global imaginary of home.

“The Midwest” is an arbitrary geographic term grounded in colonialism and European westward expansion in the United States. It is a site of stolen land, countless broken treaties between indigenous sovereign nations and the government of the United States, ongoing settler colonialism, and home to dozens of contemporary Native American nations. It was also an endpoint of the Great Migration for millions of African Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South, as well as immigrants and refugees from around the world who came to the Midwest seeking a better life. Following Halverson and Reno (2022), we view the Midwest as an “imagined middle space, less a real place or collection of places and more a screen onto which various conceptions of middle-ness and average-ness are projected.” This collection provides a way of centering real people in an effort to reclaim the middle west as a global and diverse space that can serve as both a home and place of exile, a site of both freedom and constraint, promise and disappointment, inclusion and exclusion.

Therefore, we encourage submissions from disciplines including critical refugee studies, history, geography, sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, linguistics, literature, education, urban studies, ethnic studies, American studies, and different types of art.

Prof. Dr. Jennifer Erickson
Guest Editor

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• Midwest
• refugees
• home
• exile
• counternarrative
• belonging