Podcast Interview with Alia Malek, International Reporting Program

On this episode of Trustees Without Borders, we consider what replaces the very idea of home when home itself becomes unattainable and its permanence illusory. Alia Malek discusses the meaning of home, as well as relevant local, national, and international policies and programs, positive and negative, that affect refugees.

Alia Malek is the author of A Country Called Amreeka: US History Re-Told Through Arab American Lives (Simon & Schuster, 2009) and editor of Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post 9/11 Injustices (McSweeney's 2011). With collaborators the Magnum Foundation and Al Liquidoi, Alia edited and co-conceived EUROPA: An Illustrated Introduction to Europe for Migrants and Refugees, released in Europe in 2016. Her narrative nonfiction book, The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria, was released in 2017. Her reporting has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, NewYorker.com, the Nation, the Christian Science Monitor, Jadaliyya, McSweeney’s, Guernica, and other publications.

Interviewers: Neda Moayerian, Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Virginia Tech at the Institute for Policy and Governance, and Molly Todd, a PhD student in the interdisciplinary ASPECT program at Virginia Tech, who works at the intersection of politics and culture

In Partnership with Virginia Tech's Center for Refugee, Migrant, and Displacement Studies and the Center for Rhetoric in Society at Virginia Tech.