War forced millions of Syrians from their homes. It also forced them to rethink the meaning of home itself.
In 2011, Syrians took to the streets demanding freedom. Brutal government repression transformed peaceful protests into one of the most devastating conflicts of our times, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions.
The Home I Worked to Mak ... Show More
Apr 2025
Amy Zhang, "Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China" (Stanford UP, 2024)
After four decades of reform and development, China is confronting a domestic waste crisis. As the world's largest waste-generating nation, the World Economic Forum projects that by 2030, the volume of household waste in China will be double that of the United States. Starting in ... Show More
1h 7m
Mar 7
Mattie Armstrong-Price, "Respectability on the Line: Gender, Race, and Labor along British and Colonial Indian Railways" (U California Press, 2026)
Respectability on the Line: Gender, Race, and Labor along British and Colonial Indian Railways (U California Press, 2026) by Dr. Mattie Armstrong-Price offers a social and cultural history of railway labor in Britain and colonial India from the 1840s through World War I. The book ... Show More
43m 1s
Dec 2024
Wendy Pearlman, "The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora" (Liveright, 2024)
War forced millions of Syrians from their homes. It also forced them to rethink the meaning of home itself.
In 2011, Syrians took to the streets demanding freedom. Brutal government repression transformed peaceful protests into one of the most devastating conflicts of our times, ... Show More
1h 4m
Nov 2024
Tom Scott-Smith, "Fragments of Home: Refugee Housing and the Politics of Shelter" (Stanford UP, 2024)
Abandoned airports. Shipping containers. Squatted hotels. These are just three of the many unusual places that have housed refugees in the past decade. The story of international migration is often told through personal odysseys and dangerous journeys, but when people arrive at t ... Show More
1 h
May 2023
Susan Hartman, "City of Refugees: The Story of Three Newcomers Who Breathed Life into a Dying American Town" (Beacon Press, 2022)
How can scholars employ the practices and techniques of investigative journalism?
Susan Hartman provides an answer in her intimate look at refugee experience in the United States. In City of Refugees: The Story of Three Newcomers Who Breathed Life Into A Dying American Town (Beac ... Show More
40m 45s
Dec 2024
Will Syrians return home?
Syrian refugees are celebrating the end of the Assad regime. But for Omar Alshogre and millions like him, going back to Syria is a complicated decision.
This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristi ... Show More
27m 26s
Jul 2024
Laura Robson, "Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work" (Verso, 2023)
When Americans and other citizens of advanced capitalist countries think of humanitarianism, they think of charitable efforts to help people displaced by war, disaster, and oppression find new homes where they can live complete lives.
However, as the historian Laura Robson argue ... Show More
51m 1s
Dec 2024
The final hours of the Assad regime
President Bashar al-Assad has fled Syria, ending 50 years of authoritarian rule by his family. Over the weekend, rebels who had already taken Aleppo and Hama began to close in on the city of Homs and set their eyes on the capital Damascus.As it became clear that Assad had fled, t ... Show More
28m 18s
Jul 2025
Charles Glass, "Syria: Civil War to Holy War?" (OR Books, 2024)
In December 2024, the long and bloody stalemate in Syria broke down. In a transformation breathtaking for its suddenness and speed, President Bashar al-Assad, the beating heart of Arab authoritarianism, fled to Russia, his dungeons emptying as rebels overcame the Syrian army with ... Show More
40m 2s
Jun 2025
How life is changing in Syria
For well over a decade, civil war blighted the lives of Syrians, as rebel forces battled against former President Bashar al-Assad and his brutal regime. More than 600,000 people were killed and 12 million others were forced from their homes during this time. In December last year ... Show More
23m 6s