About

Professor Miller’s teaching and research are dedicated to amplifying the voices of migrants and allowing them to narrate their own experiences. He focuses on returned Turkish migrants who participated in European guest worker programs. Through interviews, he uses their accounts to challenge narratives

developed by both sending and receiving states to characterize the role of migrants in their respective societies. Privileging self-narrated migrant and refugee experiences also drives his teaching. For example, students in his Migrants and Refugees in the 20th Century course study the history of (im)mobility and then, following IRB training and requirements, conduct oral history interviews with migrants and refugees in Northwest Pennsylvania. Students also develop analytical essays based upon their (and past students’) interviews. These interviews and student essays are digitally available to the public and offer a forum to disrupt and challenge public perceptions of migrants and refugees currently dominating the local and global media.

Professor Perez conducts ethnographic research focused on the role of churches and religious communities in Latina/o organizing and political and social life in Northeast Ohio. Specifically, she

documents the increasing number of public sanctuary cases in Ohio and the kinds of relationships and organizing that develops across race, citizenship, religious denomination, ethnicity and class to support challenges facing Latina/o communities in the region. This research includes interviewing sanctuary leaders in Ohio, Tucson, Arizona, and the Bay Area in Northern California, and makes a case for expanding the ways we conceptualize borderlands and migration to include not only the geographic space of Northeast Ohio, but also what some scholars have referred to as the “religious borderlands” that have emerged and are produced in response to heightened immigrant detention, enforcement, and additional modes of marginalization. As a cultural anthropologist with extensive teaching and research experience in heterogeneous Latina/o communities, Professor Perez’s research engages with questions of border-spanning transnational practices and inform my development of community-based learning/research courses at Oberlin College like “Sanctuary, Solidarity, and Latina/o Practices of Accompaniment” and “Latina/o Oral History.”

Professor Shammin has been studying energy solutions and climate change adaptation initiatives in Bangladesh for over a decade. In recent years, he has been working with international agencies on developing a framework for resilient and sustainable solutions for refugee camp environmental management - in the context of the Rohingya refugee crisis in Bangladesh. He has since expanded his research on refugee camp environmental management and resilience building among the refugee population. In 2020-21, he pioneered the use of environmental oral history methodologies at the Rohingya refugee camps in the Cox’s Bazar district of Bangladesh. Most recently, he is involved in a research and implementation initiative to foster youth engagement in community-based environmental problem solving. While the refugees confined in camps around the world await some kind of durable solution, Dr. Shammin’s research is situated in initiatives to improve environmental conditions, engage refugee population in meaningful endeavors, and purposefully infuse resilience building in refugee response. Dr. Shammin has developed an upper-level seminar titled Migration, Refugees and Resilience at Oberlin College.