immigrants and refugee communities

George Mason College of Public Health Professor Rebecca Sutter awarded $3 million Services to Afghan Survivors Impacted by Combat Program grant

Taylor Thomas — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 14:41:04 +0000

George Mason College of Public Health Professor Rebecca Sutter awarded $3 million Services to Afghan Survivors Impacted by Combat Program grant Taylor Thomas Fri, 09/13/2024 - 10:41

Afghan victims of combat arrive in the United States as refugees with unique health care needs. Rebecca Sutter, professor in the School of Nursing at ��AV, has been awarded a $3 million Services to Afghan Survivors Impacted by Combat (SASIC) grant to develop health service delivery infrastructure for Afghan survivors, refugees, and immigrants impacted by combat trauma and violence. The program, titled Healing and Educating Afghans for Resiliency-Virginia (HEAR-VA), will serve Afghan refugees residing in Northern and Central Virginia, where an estimated 95% of Afghans resettled in 2022.

HEAR-VA seeks to screen 500 individuals for eligibility and enroll 305 participants in care services.

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“We are implementing a care coordination model where individuals, regardless of which HEAR-VA partner they interact with first, will receive screenings, and be connected with services that address their individualized care needs,” Sutter said. "What’s especially important is this program will be built not just for, but in partnership with actual Afghan survivors of combat and other refugees who are impacted by trauma and violence."

The SASIC grant was awarded from the Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families, Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). The mission of ORR is to provide newly arrived refugees from Afghanistan with resources to begin healing combat-related trauma and facilitate sustainable physical, emotional, social, and economic well-being.

This interdisciplinary HEAR-VA initiative will be managed by the Mason and Partners Clinic in partnership with Virginia Department of Social Services Office of New Americans (DSS-ONA), the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services Office of Behavioral Health Wellness (DBHDS-OBHW), Health Brigade, Northern Virginia Family Services, and additional community partners. The program went into effect July 2024 and will extend through February 2026.

“This collection of partners is dedicated to creating an innovative program that will be community-based, community-driven, and community-led. We are building local capacity to serve vulnerable populations, not just for the duration of the grant, but long after we as the implementers have departed,” Sutter said.

In addition to her role as a professor in the School of Nursing, Sutter is the director of the Mason and Partners (MAP) Clinics. She is a credentialed Family Nurse Practitioner with expertise in community health care access and navigation to improve care and promote collaboration between public health, public safety, and health to ensure that evidence-based treatment is available for at-risk and marginalized individuals, families, communities, and populations.

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Rebecca Sutter, DNP, APRN, BC-FNP

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Refugees

immigrants and refugee communities

Access to Health Services

Community Partners

Mason and Partners Clinic

Podcast - EP 45: Describing history through the eyes of ordinary people

Damian Cristodero — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 20:29:01 +0000

Podcast - EP 45: Describing history through the eyes of ordinary people Damian Cristodero Tue, 12/13/2022 - 15:29

In This Story

Gregory Washington

Helon Habila, a professor of creative writing at ��AV, and an acclaimed international author, has never shied away from important issues. In a fascinating discussion, Habila, the author of four novels, tells Mason President Gregory Washington about his process of combining compelling narratives and characters with current examples of oppression and exploitation, and how his factual account of the 2014 kidnapping in Nigeria of 276 young girls by the terrorist group Boko Haram forced him to confront his homeland as he had never seen it.

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Access to Excellence podcast

Podcast Episode

podcast

College of Humanities and Social Sciences

creative writing

Immigration

immigrants and refugee communities

Terrorism

Navigating Our Place in the World with Kaneza Schaal

Stacey Schwartz — Thu, 02 Sep 2021 20:24:10 +0000

Navigating Our Place in the World with Kaneza Schaal Stacey Schwartz Thu, 09/02/2021 - 16:24

The company of CARTOGRAPHY (L-R) includes Janice Amaya, Noor Hamdi, Malaika Uwamahoro, Vuyo Sotashe, and Victoria Nassif.

CARTOGRAPHY is a “stunning” (The New York Times) and timely theatrical work that follows five young refugees searching for a new place to call home. Created in collaboration with Artist-in-Residence Kaneza Schaal and writer and illustrator Christopher Myers, CARTOGRAPHY draws on their work with refugee youth from around the world. The interactive performance combines visual arts, storytelling, filmmaking, sound sensor technology, and even audience cell phones to represent all of our collective journeys.

Kaneza Schaal will be on-hand at Mason for the week before the performance, engaging with Mason students and the greater community as part of her residency. Kaneza sat down with the Center for the Arts to talk about CARTOGRAPHY, her residency, and her interests in integrating technology into performance.

When did you begin CARTOGRAPHY, and what inspired your writing journey?

Kaneza: CARTOGRAPHY grew out of our work in Munich 2016 with young people who came to the city on their own from around the world.

Earlier that year, The New York Times had reported 30,000 people were arriving in Munich each day. We asked ourselves what we had to offer, as artists to this moment. We worked with kids from Mali, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Eretria, Nigeria, and Syria. They had crossed oceans in inflatable rafts, walked through forests, hidden themselves in the holds of cargo trucks. At the end of our work together, when we asked the group what should we do next, what do they want from us, they said we want a place to be seen. They said that after spending so long having to hide, where invisibility was part of survival, being seen was the most valuable part of our time together. They said we should create places for kids like them to be seen.

CARTOGRAPHY is our answer to this request. The piece creates a platform for audiences to consider their own histories of movement, how we all place ourselves in the continuum that led to this historical moment of the largest mass migration in human history.

For us, the most powerful part of the work in Munich was creating a context for young people to think together about these questions. There was a group of girls working with us who all lived in the same residence. We did a mapping exercise where each participant drew their journey. A girl from Nigeria and a girl from Syria who had been living together for three months realized for the first time that they had both been on inflatable rafts in the Mediterranean. The girl from Nigeria turned to the girl from Syria and said, “We must go home to tell our sisters not to get on these boats.”

CARTOGRAPHY is a platform to centralize young audiences to think together about this historical moment.

CARTOGRAPHY combines conventional storytelling with interactive video and sound technology. Can you share more about your interests in technology and its place/uses/purposes in performance?

Kaneza: For the children and families who have migrated, especially those crisscrossing the Mediterranean, the sea itself functions as a mystical, untethered character like the unpredictable gods of Greek tragedy. How do we interpret its motions, allowances, and punishments with any degree of rationality as ancient tales of Mediterranean migration have? There figures like Scylla and Charybdis stood in for the dangers of the sea. We understand the ocean itself as a character and embody it on stage. Through custom-designed technology we can project an image of an ocean and have actors on stage control the intensity of the waves and wind with the timbre of their voices and movements, thus inverting the experience of most migrants who find themselves tossed about by the sea.

Co-creator of CARTOGRAPHY and Artist-in-Residence Kaneza Schaal.

When did you decide on integrating interactive video technology into CARTOGRAPHY, or had this idea always been a part of your thinking for this piece?

Kaneza: The work is rooted in the commonalities of migration and the concrete and metaphorical mapping at the center of worlds in motion. The performance integrates multiple mediums to reflect the technological hybridity of our everyday lives. Visual tools such as map-making and inventory meet performance tools like filmmaking, dancing; sculptures create a catalogue of both interior and exterior journeys; sound sensor technology responds to the timbre of actors’ voices and a virtual storm is activated; cellphones are used to mark memories, the distances we have traveled. CARTOGRAPHY invites viewers to consider their own personal histories of movement and the maps we all have yet to draw.

Cell phones have become increasingly integrated with the fabric of everyday life, from mapping to financial institutions, from being in constant contact with loved ones to finding resources in resource-poor environments. Nowhere is this more evident than in the lives of contemporary migrants who may do without food or water but need their cellphones as a resource before all others. In the theater, so often, the cell phone is asked to be shut off. In CARTOGRAPHY, we utilize this tool of travel in our storytelling. Through a residency with the Interactive Media Laboratory at the AbuDhabi Arts Center, we built an interactive mapping platform that allows the live audience to map their own personal histories of movement onto our stage through a closed network server. Thus, every member in the audience is invited to consider their own family’s history of movement, whether recent or generations removed, in the ongoing continuum of migration.

I understand that you have worked with Mason’s Game Design Program and Virginia Serious Game Institute (VSGI) to develop technology for a new performance piece. Can you share more about that project and what you have learned working with them?

Kaneza: In this moment of social distance, we are rethinking the process of sharing theatrical works and looking toward new technologies as sites of engagement with live performance. I am interested in pursuing two kinds of interventions. The first uses augmented reality to envision a hidden world onstage during a live performance. The second brings a recorded performance into the intimacy, architecture, and kinetic life of people’s homes.

My research with Mason’s Game Design Program will be used in my upcoming work KLII, which will premiere at the Walker Arts Center in January.

What do you hope that people take away from the performance of CARTOGRAPHY?

Keneza: Whether recent or many generations passed, we are all part of the history of human migration which has brought us to this historical moment.

CARTOGRAPHY: Saturday, October 2, 2021 at 7 p.m. at the Center for the Arts.
Tickets are available here.

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Kaneza Schaal

Game Design

Center for the Arts

immigrants and refugee communities

College of Visual and Performing Arts

immigrants and refugee communities

George Mason College of Public Health Professor Rebecca Sutter awarded $3 million Services to Afghan Survivors Impacted by Combat Program grant

Discover the nursing program at George Mason

In This Story

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Podcast - EP 45: Describing history through the eyes of ordinary people

In This Story

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Navigating Our Place in the World with Kaneza Schaal

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