Nik Parent

Background

During the Winter 2021 term, thirteen graduate students at the Department of Geography, McGill University, organized and participated in an informal reading group to explore topics related to race, racism, and racialization from a critical geographies perspective. This initiative was the outcome of a lack in graduate level courses exploring race, social issues, oppression, and resistance offered by the Department of Geography, and from a growing demand for such courses from graduate students who are increasingly aware of the need, importance, and urgency of exploring such themes. The Geography Graduate Society Equity Working Group responded to this by launching the ‘Racial Geographies sub-committee’. This reading group is the outcome of this sub-committee’s work.

Format

Members of this reading group met on a bi-weekly basis, on Thursdays from 10am to noon. In total, reading group members met over 16 contact hours. Each session was organized based on the preferences of the ‘session lead’. This person was in charge of selecting the readings (2-5 articles or book chapters), introducing the session topic, and facilitating session engagements. Sometimes the session lead re-lied on audiovisual material, sometimes not.

Final report

For our final report, including the reading group syllabus and postmortem, is available here.

Abstract

African migrants are taking longer and riskier journeys in the search of new destinations and improved opportunities. Elevated risks lead to feelings of stress, anxiety, and trauma, which makes the question of how migrants cope during such journeys an increasingly important area of research. Current research on migrant religious coping has focused on its use prior to departure and post-arrival. Few studies, however, have considered the role of religious coping during the process of migration. Based on interview data of three African shipwreck survivors travelling from Cape Verde to Brazil, this article discusses how they used religious coping as a positive coping strategy during a month spent lost on the Atlantic Ocean. The use of religious coping strategies directly after arrival is also explored. Through the analysis of this extreme case, the article contributes to the literatures on Muslim migrant religious coping and South-South migration from Africa to South America.

Citation

Parent, N., Freier, L.F., and Dawson, W. In Press, 2021. Lost at sea, saved by Allah: religious coping on a migrant journey from Cape Verde to Brazil. Mental Health, Religion and Culture. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13674676.2021.1919069.

Availability

The full text is available here.

Background

Project Synergy is a biannual publication centered on vibrance, life, arts & culture. When preparing their first issue, themed ‘Origins’, Artistic Director Alessia Giha Rodríguez ask me to make a written contribution. In this short essay, I engage with the question of human nature and its relation to humanity’s sense of origin. Here, I forewarn readers of this issue, asking them to reflect on the hazards of naturalizing myths and scripts about human organization and sociality.

Availability

‘Hazards and hachures of origins’ is available here. The full issue is available here.

Background

At the International Conference on Environmental Crises in the Indian Ocean World since 1800, hosted in May 2021 by McGill University’s Indian Ocean World Centre (IOWC), Prof. Jon Unruh and I present ongoing research exploring the significance of neo-Ottomanism and hydropolitics within the Middle East security environment.

Abstract

The changing scale and duration of drought in the Levant has undermined the agricultural and life-providing traits of the Fertile Crescent. Crop failure, food insecurity, and economic downturn in rural areas have served as a case in point of environmental change in this region. Looking to the sociopolitical implications of these changes, it is now widely accepted that the 2006-2011 drought in Syria played a central role in what has become a violent internationalized civil war, spilling into neighboring Iraq. While climate change stands as an important determinant to drought in this region, scholars, civil society, and public commentators have insufficiently considered the role of surface and ground water in these changes. Where water flowing through the Tigris-Euphrates river system stands as the lifeblood of much of the Middle East, the geographic extent of this hydrological basin asks us to look upstream, to its source areas in Turkey and beyond the conflict zone. Positioning itself at the intersection of resource management and geopolitics, this article uses hydropolitics to disentangle Turkey’s influential role in the Middle East security landscape. Where Lake Van and the Taurus mountain range mark the source of both the Tigris and Euphrates, respectively, major dam projects since the 1970s have incrementally lowered the annual flow volume of both rivers. While both Iraq and Syria have accused Turkey of water hoarding, the country’s near two-decade long leadership has argued its sovereign right to this resource, continuing to develop new dam projects. Having already weaponized this resource to flood Kurdish settlements, there is a credible claim that Turkey will use water to achieve other political goals. The authors explore this by considering the neo-Ottoman project, one defined by a revival of the former empire’s ideals, foreign policy, and regional influence. Looking to the current occupation of northern Syria by Turkish armed forces, we draw attention to the relevance of water weaponization and drought-influenced security vacuums in this new form of regional imperialism.

Availability

Presentation slides are available here.

Background

This piece of exploratory comparative research was presented at the 2021 conference of the American Association of Geographers, as part of the ‘Refugees and the right to the city: perspectives from the Global South (Part II)’ panel organized by Diala Lteif.

Abstract

Evidence from recent large-scale displacement situations suggests that state responses to forced displacement are increasingly politically motivated, rather than resulting from a humanitarian duty to protect. As the securitization and criminalization of migration become further entrenched in law and policy, the instrumentalization of refugees is quickly becoming a staple of political playbooks worldwide. Externally, refugees have become peons to foreign policy. Internally, they are placeholders made responsible for the ills of society, an agreeable accusation in emerging ethnonationalist landscapes. As a result, refugee rights, needs, and claims have been occluded. The state’s central role in creating conditions of uncertainty, marginalization, and informality, however, are leading to its own demise and self-destruction in refugee spaces. Effectively, frustrations and dwindling faith in host country governments are providing a substratum for the production of refugee livelihoods, relationships, and identities that coalesce around shared acrimony toward state institutions that have abandoned them. Based on extensive fieldwork in Turkey and Peru, this article shows how some refugee communities have adapted to difficult material and existential conditions by creating geographic spaces and places of meaning that are beyond the state. Where subjectivities and performances converge upon subversion, autonomy, and mutual aid, the ethnographic cases of refugee placemaking presented are ontologically explored through the prism of anarchist philosophy and praxis. The observations are evocative, asking us to reflect on how displacement and resulting reformulations of space and place intersect with notions of futurities that are beyond the state.

Availability

Presentation slides are available here.