Meaningless Citizenship: Iraqi Refugees and the Welfare State

Dr. Sally Bonet is an assistant professor of Educational Studies at Colgate University. Bonet is an anthropologist of education who specializes in the study of forced migration and citizenship education, with a focus on Arab, Muslim, and African refugees.

Bonet will discuss her book, Meaningless Citizenship, an in-depth ethnography of recently resettled Iraqi refugees in Philadelphia. Bonet’s work demonstrates how encounters with critical institutions of the state—including public schooling, resettlement programs, healthcare, and public assistance—are an inherently educative process for both refugee youths and adults, teaching about the types of citizenship they are expected to enact and embody while simultaneously shaping them into laboring subjects in service of neoliberal capitalism.