About

Welcome message by Álvaro Garrido (FEUC) and Tiago Santos Pereira (CES) | Lecturer's presentation by Marisa Ramos Gonçalves (CES)

Overview

Behrouz Boochani will reflect on his experiences and those of other refugees who were incarcerated in Australian-run offshore detention centres in Papua New Guinea, during almost seven years. He will discuss border violence and creative resistance, critical themes in his award-winning literary and artistic work where he documents his encounters with colonial violence, in his home in Kurdish Iran to his perilous journeys from Indonesia to Australia. Writing to remember the histories of people in the margins and to fight against the dehumanisation of refugees and immigrants, his work highlights the violent nature of the nation-state.

Bio note

Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian writer, journalist, scholar, cultural advocate and filmmaker. He is an Associate Professor in Social Sciences at UNSW; non-resident Visiting Scholar at the Sydney Asia Pacific Migration Centre (SAPMiC), University of Sydney; Honorary Member of PEN International; and winner of an Amnesty International Australia 2017 Media Award, the Diaspora Symposium Social Justice Award, the Liberty Victoria 2018 Empty Chair Award, and the Anna Politkovskaya award for journalism.
He was a writer for the Kurdish language magazine Werya; he holds a Masters degree in political science, political geography and geopolitics and graduated from Tarbiat Moallem University and Tarbiat Modares University, in Tehran.
Behrouz was a political prisoner incarcerated by the Australian government in Papua New Guinea for almost seven years. In November 2019 Behrouz escaped to New Zealand. He now resides in Wellington, New Zealand.

Activity within the College of Global Studies (CGS-CES)