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Summary
Ravenscroft, M. (2024). Staging Presence for Spatial Dignity: Exploring Representations of Refugee Girlhood. Girlhood Studies, 17(1), 18-35.
Abstract
In exploring the figuration and physical presence of Little Amal, a 12-foot Syrian girl puppet and main character in a moving piece of epic public theater titled The Walk, I consider the dueling realities of welcomeness and unwantedness, hypervisibility and invisibility, spatial dignity and spatial denial faced by refugee girls, real and represented. Accessing a feminist refugee epistemology, I position Amal in contrast to yet another symbol of refugee girlhood—popstar M.I.A.—to move away from the typical simultaneously superfluous and stunted representations of sanctuary-seeking girls and toward a provocation that accepts their creative and complex lifeworlds.