CHR Book Launch: Sophia Balakian, "Unsettled Families Refugees, Humanitarianism, and the Politics of Kinship"
A conversation moderated by Christopher Morris
Friday, February 6, 2026 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM EST
Hybrid- Horizon Hall 6325 and Zoom
Please join us for a CHR Book Launch featuring Sophia Balakian in conversation with Christopher Morris!
REGISTER HERE (event is hybrid- RSVP only necessary for Zoom participants)
Unsettled Families: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and the Politics of Kinship by Sophia Balakian
Against the backdrop of the global refugee crisis, Unsettled Families investigates the parameters that Global North governments and international humanitarian organizations use to classify most displaced families—more than 99% globally—as ineligible for resettlement, and often as fraudulent. But "fraud" as a category is not as self-evident as it may first appear. Nor is "the family." Based on long-term fieldwork between Nairobi, Kenya and Columbus, Ohio, Sophia Balakian tells stories of Somali and Congolese refugees navigating a complicated global assemblage of humanitarian organizations, immigration bureaucracies, and national security agencies as they seek permanent, new homes. Viewing the concepts of "fraud" and "family" from different vantage points in this context, Balakian shows how the categories begin to blur out of focus, sometimes to evaporate altogether; what seems to be contained within them scatter outside their received boundaries. Practices that resettlement organizations deem fraudulent are often understood by people living as refugees to be moral actions in an unequal world. Such practices allow them to fulfill obligations to kin—kin defined expansively, in ways that at times exceed the boundaries of normative, US frameworks. Bringing questions of kinship into current discussions on humanitarianism, Balakian locates "the family" as a crucial category in processes of producing, policing, and contesting the boundaries of nation-states in the 21st century.
Sophia Balakian is a socio-cultural anthropologist and assistant professor in the School of Integrative Studies. Her work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies; and has been published in journals such as American Ethnologist and the Journal of Refugee Studies. Her book Unsettled Families: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and the Politics of Kinship was published by Stanford University Press in 2025. Her new research deals with refugee resettlement in the DC metro area in an age of right-wing populism.
Christopher Morris is an associate professor of anthropology at George Mason University. His research investigates medical and environmental politics as intertwined sites of governance and contestation. His ethnographic work in southern Africa and beyond examines how such politics are lived and enacted across everyday and institutional settings. His first book is Biotraffic: Medicines and Environmental Governance in the Afterlives of Apartheid (University of California Press, 2024).
