The Leelanau Township Library will be hosting a discussion titled “Refugees, Migrants, and the Right to Move” with Professor Laura Robson at 2 p.m. Monday.
In this program, Robson will discuss how the international system defines refugees, migrants, and asylum, and how those words as legal concepts don’t always map onto people’s own understandings of the terms, and what that means for how the system of international migration works in a more general sense.
Robson is Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University. She is a scholar of international and Middle Eastern history, with a special interest in questions of refugeedom, forced migration, and statelessness. Her most recent books are “Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work (2023), a wideranging investigation of the many twentieth century schemes to deploy refugees as labor migrants across the globe,” and “The League of Nations (with Joseph Maiolo; 2025), a reconsideration of the meaning and import of this first experiment in formal internationalism. Laura is the cofounder and co-editor of StatelessHistories.org, a digital humanities project exploring the varied and multifaceted experience of statelessness in the modern era, and an inaugural member of the Wilson Center’s Refugee and Forced Displacement Initiative, now housed at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, DC. Reach out to the library with any questions.
