In this episode we hear the story of a freshman film major at the University of Kansas whose parents are both from Cameroon. We explore the themes of home, and the connection that children of immigrants feel to the home country of their parents.
Photograph of plantains by Yemisi Ogbe, distributed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. The music that plays in the beginning and end is Arid Foothills by Kevin Macleod and was licensed through Creative Commons. His music can be found on Incompetech.com.
In this episode we hear the story of a software developer from Sudan. We explore the themes of hope, discrimination, and what it’s like to leave a country that you love.
Photograph of a Cessna 172 by FlugKerl2, distributed under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license. The music that plays in the beginning and end is Arid Foothills by Kevin Macleod and was licensed through Creative Commons. His music can be found on Incompetech.com.
In this episode we hear the story of an engineer and father from Morocco. We explore the themes of why people choose to leave home, and how having children affects your perspective.
Photograph of Kenitra in Morocco by Hakim Dahoune, distributed in the public domain. The music that plays in the beginning and end is Arid Foothills by Kevin Macleod and was licensed through Creative Commons. His music can be found on Incompetech.com.
Iman Al Hassan was born in Columbia, MO and raised primarily in Kansas City, Missouri, but is a “generational immigrant” who maintains strong cultural ties back to Nigeria, where both of her parents were born. She is also the author of Unrequited, a collection of poetry that voices stories of love, loss, the struggles of family and of cross-cultural differences through the journey to self-actualization of the second generation American, Muslim author.
Bhaa Elashkar was born and raised in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, but maintains strong ties back to Egypt, where his parents were born, as well as to the United Arab Emirates, where he worked and met his wife.
A small town in the heart of America’s Bible Belt grapples with rapidly changing demographics. Longtime African-American and white residents work to build a sense of community with a growing Latino population and with hundreds of new Muslim refugees from Somalia. Continue Reading
The most difficult issue in exploring any new issue is deciding the best place to start. Below you will find a brief bibliography of resources to help get you started. Included among them are both scholarly and more popular treatments, from a wide range of sources. Continue Reading
The maps below present the Africa-born population in the midwestern United States based on the 2015 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau.
They were created by Dr. Di Shi and Regina Thomas of the KU Department of Geography and Atmospheric Science and are being shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.
Julie Morris, PhD candidate in the Department of Geography and Atmospheric Science, discusses African immigration to the Midwest, with extensive demographic comparisons of the newcomers to those born in the U.S.
Annotated Bibliography of additional readings on migration to the Midwest
Professor Abel Chikanda, KU Department of African & African-American Studies, places African immigration to the U.S. in historical context and discusses the degree to which these African immigrants exhibit the economic mobility and social inclusion necessary for successful integration into their new communities.
In May of 2017 Dr. Tanya Hartman, student Assistant Daisy Crane, and KASC ethnographic research coordinator Marwa Ghazali conducted a two-day workshop at Wichita East High School. The workshop sought to cultivate a safe space that encourages migrant students to share their stories, while also giving them strategies to make that process easier. These methods included having students tell the stories behind material objects that they possess, encouraging them to describe what they miss most from the countries they have left behind, sharing the rituals that define their cultures.
The Ashland Public Library will host a presentation by Marwa Ghazali, an anthropology PhD student at the University of Kansas who wrote her master’s thesis on the Bantu Somali of Kansas City. The presentation will take place at 7 p.m. on Friday, April 28th.
Henry Lubega, a native of Uganda, came to the United States after escaping from a rebel group that forced him to fight on their behalf in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Mpho Kekana grew up in post-apartheid South Africa before moving to Maryville, Missouri. He tells the story of his first encounters with overt racism when his family moved from an all black township into an all white suburban neighborhood.
A small town in the heart of America’s Bible Belt grapples with rapidly changing demographics. Longtime African-American and white residents work to build a sense of community with a growing Latino population and with hundreds of new Muslim refugees from Somalia. Continue Reading
Aminatta Forna is the award-winning author of the three novels: The Hired Man, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones, and a critically-acclaimed memoir The Devil that Danced on the Water. She is currently a Lannan Visiting Chair at Georgetown University.