With questions of immigration, asylum, refugees, and deportation at the forefront of American politics, Hunter’s Civil Discourse & Intellectual Dialogue series hosted a Fordham University expert on migration.
Professor Marciana Popescu of Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Service spoke on “Migration Narratives in the United States: Building Community Capacity and Resilience” at Hunter’s Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute, outlining an intellectual framework for understanding the refugee experience and how the government and social-service agencies have responded to it.
Popescu, a member of the United Nations-Non-Governmental Organization’s Committee on Migration, has studied forced migration as it relates to violence against women, intimate-partner violence in conservative Christian faith communities in America, and health- and mental-health care services for women asylum seekers in New York City.
She has conducted several studies in Haiti focusing on post-disaster displacement and on the forced migration crisis at the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. She has developed a rights-based conceptual framework to help low- and middle-income countries assimilate refugees, which piloted in Guatemala.
The discussion aligned with a campaign to foster civil discourse and tolerance across CUNY’s 25 campuses, which was announced by CUNY Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez this past August during a visit to Hunter College.
