The Child at the Border: How Children Perform Displacement
ACLS Fellow in Residence
April 28, 2026
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Location
Institute for the Humanities, 153 Behavioral Sciences Building
Address
1007 W. Harrison St, Chicago, IL 60607
Calendar
Download iCal FileThere are currently 123.2 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, nearly half of them under 18. As displacement accelerates, mainstream media’s focus on children has intensified debates about innocence, deservingness, and citizenship. Artists, too, have turned toward the figure of the child on the move. But how, and why, have children become main characters in the grand drama of contemporary displacement? Recent cinematic and theatrical representations of refugee children from the Middle East and South Asia reveal an adoptive gaze, in which children elicit sympathy insofar as they appear adoptable, whether into the nuclear family or the nation-state. While directors mobilize children as symbols of what borders are or could become, child actors—many of them refugees themselves—do not simply inhabit these roles, but strategically negotiate them.
Suhaila Meera is a director, dramaturg, and Assistant Professor of Theatre at Lewis & Clark College. She is working on her first book project, a cultural analysis of how and why children became main characters in the grand drama of contemporary displacement, with a focus on South Asia and the Middle East. Her writing has appeared in Performance Research, Studies in South Asian Film & Media, Women’s Studies, Theatre Journal, and Theatre Topics. She recently adapted and directed Bhisham Sahni’s Pali at Stanford University, and was the dramaturg for Yilong Liu’s PrEP Play, or Blue Parachute at the New Conservatory Theatre Center.
Contact huminst@uic.edu for accessibility requests.
Date posted
Jan 12, 2026
Date updated
Mar 30, 2026