ANU Migration Hub Seminar: Governing Desire

Join us for an in-person talk by Helena Zeweri from the University of British Columbia!

ANU Migration Hub Seminar with Helena Zeweri

What does it mean to deter migration in a culturally sensitive way? This talk, presented by Helena Zeweri and hosted by the ANU Migration Hub, examines cultural sensitivity as an organizing discourse and infrastructure of Public Information Campaigns (PICs) devised by the Australian and US governments to deter irregular migration. Australia and USPICs offer an exemplary comparative case study not only because they share similar aesthetics and messaging; but also because they are increasingly invested in culturally sensitive messaging as they expand deterrence efforts across multiple continents.

Helena Zeweri is a visiting academic from the University of British Columbia. Drawn to the field of anthropology because of its ability to attend to how people navigate relations of power in everyday life, Helena believes in the power of ethnography to capture the nuances of people’s multi-layered experiences of systems, institutions, and policies. She completed her doctoral studies in Cultural Anthropology at Rice University, where she conductedresearch on migrant-targeted social welfare policies in Melbourne, Australia, observing theeveryday work of family violence prevention workers, policymakers, and migrant community leaders. After completing her PhD, she spent two years as an Assistant Professor (generalfaculty) at the University of Virginia’s Global Studies Program.

Now at UBC Anthropology, she teaches courses in culture, power, and politics; diasporic belonging; ethnographies of Australia; and the relationship between empire and migration.She is also co-coordinator for the Borders Research Group at the UBC Centre for Migration Studies. Helena’s recent book Between Care and Criminality: Marriage, Citizenship, and Family in Australian Social Welfare (Rutgers University Press, 2024) looks at the entanglement between criminal justice and immigration systems within migrant-targetedsocial policy in Australia. Her current research examines how Afghan diasporic political life in Australia and the US is shaped by the enduring effects of displacement, carceral border regimes, and empire. Helena’s work has been published in various journals, including: theInternational Feminist Journal of Politics, Ethnos, the Journal of Refugee Studies, and the Australian Journal of Social Issues.