EP 15 Alison Turner — RUTH MUKWANA

Stories and Humanitarian Action

In 2022, 274 million people will need humanitarian assistance and protection. Preventing, mitigating and responding to humanitarian crises is a challenge. Can fiction and storytelling play a role? Can it raise awareness and motivate action to address the causes and consequences of humanitarian crises? SAHA Podcast discusses this question.

In this episode, I spoke with Alison Turner about her essay, The Autological Archive: Appraisal, Institutional Motives, and Essentializing Identity in Refugee and Asylum Seekers Narratives, In and Out of Fiction where she argues that fiction can expose parts of archival/application processes that impact who is and who is not granted asylum in the United States.

She says, “So, the autologic function that I’m pointing out here is that as bureaucracy builds, as people apply for asylum and refugee status in the United States, those who are accepted for asylum create an archive of accepted people to resettle that then informs who is accepted later. It’s responding to this fact that less than one per cent of the refugees who apply for asylum in the United States are invited to resettle. I’m asking what about those other 99 per cent, and how does the way the stories of the one percent are told on paper predict the kinds of stories that will be selected in the future to be invited to resettle.”