Materialising Exile

<p> Focusing on the highly diverse Karenni refugee population living in camps on the Thai-Burma border this innovative book explores materiality embodiment memory imagination and identity among refugees providing new and important ways of understanding how refugees make sense of experience self and other. It examines how and to what ends refugees perceive represent manipulate use as metaphor and otherwise engage with material objects and spaces and includes a focus on the real and metaphorical journeys that bring about and perpetuate exile.</p><p> The combined emphasis on both displacement and materiality and the analysis of the cultural construction and intersections of exilic objects spaces and bodies are unique in the study of both refugees and material culture. Drawing theoretical influences from phenomenology aesthetics and beyond as well as from refugee studies and anthropology the author addresses the current lack of theoretical analysis of the material visual spatial and embodied aspects of forced migration providing a fundamentally interlinked analysis of enforced exile and materiality.</p>