Hello there! Christian Bevilacqua, BA:
I am a human geographer and MA student at Syracuse University. My work sits at the intersection of migration geographies, South Asia studies, and Middle East studies.
Overall, I seek to understand: How is belonging lived through everyday practice?
Working with South Asian migrant communities in Jordan, I examine how belonging and identity take shape through lived spatial forms. Centering Amman, I examine the negotiated and aesthetic ways they move through, encounter, and rework the city while navigating questions of belonging, identity, home, and nation. 🌏
As a first-generation scholar, my work is indebted to the communities who share their stories with me and push me to challenge the simplicity of calling some place 'home.'
Over the past five years, my understanding of migration has been shaped by uneven, situated encounters. I think of my Italian father’s swear-laced stories of guest work in the UK to talks over chai across the U.S., India, and the Middle East. These moments continue to unsettle any simple notions of mobility, belonging, and identity.
“Too often we think the work of fighting oppression is just intellectual. The real work is personal, emotional, spiritual, and communal. It is explicit, with a deep and”
― Dr. Bettina Love, We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom
I invoke Love to signal my commitment to inclusive education and to a deeper reckoning with the ethics of geographic knowledge production and the colonial legacies that shape the discipline and academia more broadly.
