This event is presented in partnership with the Chicago Humanities Festival.
Since the 2011 uprising evolved into a brutal war, millions of Syrians have been forced to flee their homes. Northwestern Professor of Political Science Wendy Pearlman has spent more than a decade interviewing hundreds of Syrian refugees to explore how people remake and rethink home after displacement. Her new book The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora shares stories and reflections from Syrians around the world — now in places from Turkey to Norway, Japan, Brazil, and beyond — as they make sense of their own movement and migration. Pearlman sits down with Lina Sergie Attar, founder and CEO of the Illinois-based Karam Foundation, to talk about the book, discuss the shift from Syrian “refugee crisis” to diaspora-making, and challenge our conceptions of the universal question: “What is home?”