RESCHEDULED - CRS Seminar - Film Screening and Panel: "Citizens of Nowhere"
Please note that this screening has been postponed. It will be rescheduled for the 2024 Winter semester.
"Citizens of Nowhere" is a powerful film that sheds light on the heart-rending stories of stateless people in America, whose lives have been on hold for years. Produced by international film production company “”, and directed by Alicia Sully, the film tells the heart-rending stories of people whose lives have been on hold for years.
Guest Speakers:
Karina Ambartsoumian-Clough is the executive director of United Stateless, a national organization led by stateless people whose mission is to build and inspire community among those affected by statelessness in the US, and to advocate for their human rights. Born in Soviet Ukraine, of Armenian descent, Karina came to the U.S. as an asylum seeker with her family in 1996 when she was eight years old. Five years later, the final appeal of her family’s asylum claim was denied, and she received a “final order of removal” from the U.S., and was told to “self deport”.
Karina was too young to qualify for a passport when she left Soviet Ukraine with her parents. Now, years later, she has no country to return home to. Unable to meet the requirements of the nationality law of the newly established Republic of Ukraine, Karina does not qualify for a Ukrainian nationality / citizenship, making “self deportation” or travel out of the United States impossible. Karina is - literally — a Citizen of Nowhere, through no choice or fault of her own. In 2013, Karina married Kevin, a U.S. Citizen, yet Karina’s stateless status prevents her from becoming a U.S. Citizen. , Karina connected with other stateless people in the U.S for the first time in 2017. It soon became clear that a formal structure was needed to connect their ideas and stories with other stateless people, stakeholders, advocates, legal community and academia. As our first Executive Director, Karina continues to lead United Stateless on the principle that those directly impacted can lead and are experts because of their lived experiences. For her work and dedication, Karina has been honored with the and to have been recognized as the by PA State Representative Mary Isaacson
Jamie Chai Yun Liew is a professor at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law. Her forthcoming book GHOST CITIZENS, a sociolegal study on statelessness, will be published by Fernwood Publishing in February 2024.
Amal de Chickera is a Sri Lankan human rights lawyer, advocate and activist, with expertise in the right to nationality, statelessness, movement building and discrimination. He is a co-founder and Co-Director of the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion. He has researched, advocated, written, spoken, delivered training and served as an expert on statelessness and related issues for the UN, NGOs and academia, since 2008. Amal also serves as ISI’s representative on the Interim Core Group of the nascent Global Movement Against Statelessness. Amal believes in the power of the arts to shape and inform our understanding and response to issues of social (in)justice. He has (co) authored children’s books and graphic novels to bring the challenge of statelessness to new audiences. Before co-founding the Institute, Amal led the statelessness work of the Equal Rights Trust. He was also a co-founder of the European Network on Statelessness, and a founding member of Stages - a Sri Lankan theatre group.
Moderator: Areej Alshammiry is a Vanier Scholar. She is a PhD student in Sociology, an activist, and a community-based researcher. She is interested in understanding state violence and social inequalities. Specifically, she examines how legal identity is weaponized to perpetuate racial, ethnic, religious, gendered and class inequalities. Her research explores the colonial, capitalist, patriarchal and racial foundations of settler/nation-states, (Im)migration, citizenship, and statelessness.
Areej’s work focuses mainly on the Arab Gulf region and Canada. She is also an advocate working on statelessness and nationality rights globally, she is a member on the Interim Core Group of a rising Global Movement Against Statelessness. She researches, writes, advocates on statelessness as her topic of expertise, and has a lived experience with it. She has years of experience working as an interdisciplinary researcher and a grass-roots activist, and much of her thinking is informed by the interconnections between the two. Areej’s work is informed by social justice and community-oriented goals and action. She is inspired by anti-racist feminist and anti/de-colonial socio-political thinking. She has presented at multiple global and national conferences that focus on statelessness, intersectionality, and critical border studies.
