“The strength of this wonderful monograph is thus a form of participatory action research, in which neutrality is not desirable and in which the researcher has a strong stake in the struggle for justice and the reconstruction of home and freedom in political exile…Sharples succeeds to use her position to amplify the voices of a very vulnerable, but resourceful people.” • Anthropos
“This is a first-rate book… One of its major strengths is the position of the author in writing from an informed position, following many years of immersion in the context.” • Linda Briskman, Western Sydney University
Exploring notions of activism and space as narrated by Karen displaced persons and refugees in the Thai-Burma borderlands, this book looks beyond refugees as passive victims or a ‘humanitarian case’. Instead, the book examines the active engagement the Karen have with their persecution and displacement and their subsequent emplacement in the borderlands. A key focus of the book is to look at this engagement in terms of spaces of solidarity – constructed through patterns of activism, paths of connectivity and processes of cultural recovery. The book also studies the spatial configuration of borderlands, examining the impact of cross-border activities and their inter-related nature.
Rachel Sharples is a Researcher in the Challenging Racism Project in the School of Social Sciences and Psychology at Western Sydney University. She has worked with the Karen and conducted research in the Thai-Burma borderlands since 2002.
LC: DS432.K2 S43 2020
BISAC: SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; SOC053000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Regional Studies; SOC066000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Refugees
