Seminar Series | Dr Zalfa Feghali "Archiving Vunerability : Children's Crisis Text at the US-Mexican Border"

Iontas Sky
Thursday, November 26, 2020 - 16:00 to 18:00
Online

Dr Zalfa Feghali "Archiving Vunerability:Children's Crisis Text at the US-Mexican Border"
A research seminar delivered by Dr Zalfa Feghali, and hosted by the English Department at Maynooth University

 

About this Event

The English Department at Maynooth University, in conjunction with CRISES (Critical Research Into States, Ecologies, and Societies) is pleased to host Dr Zalfa Feghali of the University of Leicester in the last of our seminar series on the Humanities and Human Rights.

About the talk:

There is an unprecedented emergency, or crisis, at the United States' southern border. The crisis, however, is not solely an immigration, crime, drug, or terror crisis, as the Trump Administration and others have argued, but in fact a children’s crisis which has been deepening over the last decade and stretches back across at least the last twenty years, and which until now has been largely ignored as a category of border studies and cultural analysis. In this talk, Dr Zalfa Feghali conceptualises the U.S.-Mexico border as the site of a unexamined archival repository of a catastrophic crisis of vulnerability in the Americas by exploring contemporary cultural responses to the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, what she calls children’s crisis texts.

Speaker biography:

Zalfa Feghali is a lecturer in American literature at the University of Leicester, specialising in border studies, gender, and citizenship in contemporary North American cultural studies. She’s the author of Crossing Borders and Queering Citizenship (2019), co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands (2023), and an Associate Editor of The Journal of American Studies. Her current project is Alone, Missing, Murdered: Reading Vulnerability Across North American Borders.