Sarah Stillman on Simulating the Refugee Experience
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 28 November 2016
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the interactive exhibit “Forced From Home”, visitors step into the role of refugees. Participants are assigned a home country from which they’re fleeing, and are made to choose five objects to bring on the journey; groups are squeezed onto perilous life rafts and into tent camps that appear so flimsy that the wind might blow them away. The exhibit was created by Doctors Without Borders (M.S.F.). The staff writer Sarah Stillman visited the installation with Africa Stewart, an obstetrician-gynecologist and veteran of M.S.F. missions to South Sudan and other nations. Stillman found that the exhibit quickly overcame her skepticism about the effort to simulate a refugee’s experience.
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| 0:48.9 | I'm Dorothy Wickendon. |
| 0:50.4 | On today's Politics and More podcast, the New Yorker's Sarah Stillman visits Forced |
| 0:55.6 | from Home, an interactive exhibit created by Doctors Without Borders, which attempts to recreate |
| 1:00.9 | the experience of refugees fleeing their home countries. |
| 1:06.7 | I'm David Remnick, and I'm here with one of the great reporters around today, Sarah Stillman. |
| 1:12.5 | And I hope you don't mind if I brag a little bit. She just won a MacArthur Fellowship, |
| 1:16.4 | better known as the Genius Award. |
| 1:18.5 | Sarah, you've written for the magazine about issues facing refugees, |
| 1:21.7 | and you've covered the huge number of people that have been fleeing gang violence and chaos in Central America. |
| 1:27.3 | But recently you spent an afternoon at a pretend refugee camp. |
| 1:31.0 | What was that about? |
| 1:32.3 | So Doctors Without Borders decided to put on this exhibit, and it's called Forced from Home. |
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