David Turkon (Anthropology) was lead author on the paper, Connecting Sudanese Refugees with Their Past Through the Lost Boys Reunited Project, that he presented at the annual meetings of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) in Seattle on March 30.
The paper explored the importance that records from refugee camps can play in helping refugees reconstruct their social histories. David is a part of a group who are working to repatriate Sudanese refugees, who were unaccompanied minors at the time they fled civil war, with such records. Contributing to David’s paper were Ann Wheat of the AZ Lost Boys Center, Brenda Felldin of the AZ Lost Boys Center and Felldin Marketing Communications, and Leon Hauck of Progressive Computing. The paper David presented was part of a session titled Orphans and Adoption: Through an Anthropological Lens.
On April 1 at the SfAA meetings, David served as discussant for a panel examining ways to identify need among refugee populations and to develop strategies to assist refugee resettlement in ways that build social and economic capacity among the targeted population. This panel focused on the work of the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology in Tucson, AZ and was titled Assessing the Refugee Experience: New Perspectives and New Tools.
https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20110410114133920