In Search of a New Homeland

The origin of my MDes thesis/project is a story I wrote to document my journey from Syria to Canada as a refugee. It motivated the visual and theoretical research that came to inform the thesis that follows and the three multimedia books that constitute its visual component. My thesis/project employs autoethnography and research-for-creation methods to capture and convey the experience of my journey. It marries this exploration of personal experience with theoretical investigation—specifically, Edward Said’s idea of “Orientalism,” Frantz Fanon’s notions of recognition, performance, and “interrogative subjectivity, and Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of hybridity—in order to examine refugee identity. Relying on self-reflection and the findings of my theoretical investigations, my thesis consider the importance of cultural identity in asking the question: “what is the experience of losing one’s homeland?”