A voice for Houston's Refugees
Yehuda Sharim received his doctorate in Culture and Performance from the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture department of World Arts and Cultures in 2013. Now at Rice University, Sharim is leading an activist project aimed to empower the diverse refugee and migrant communities in the Houston area.
Yehuda Sharim is the Aubrey ’42 and Sylvia Farb Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies and a scholar at the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice. A native of Israel whose parents immigrated there from Iran, Sharim’s research chronicles the creation of Sephardic-Mizrahi identity. In addition to his teaching duties, Sharim is leading a project that documents the lives and experiences of Houston’s growing refugee and migrant communities. The multipronged project, dubbed “Houston in Motion: Empowering Houston Migrant and Refugee Communities,” will bring together video footage, oral histories, educational events, research, technology and survey data to document and engage with Houston’s diverse refugee and migrant communities. The project has received funding from the Rice University Center for Civic Leadership’s Hilda and Hershel Rich Endowment for Student Community Service as well as the Kinder Institute.
Elizabeth Long, a Rice professor emerita of sociology, and Yan Digilov ’11, a strategist for the Firestarter Group, a nonprofit social impact investment firm, are also leading the project. Sharim spoke with editors at Rice Magazine and the Kinder Institute about his work. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
How did you become interested in working with refugees?
It’s always been the focus of my work. I’m from a family of refugee immigrants. It was a different experience than refugees face in Houston in 2016, but I’m aware of the struggles that are acts of migration. It’s about reinventing oneself in a new place, reinventing home when you don’t know what home is.
When I came to Houston, I began contacting refugee resettlement organizations and met Yan Digilov, of the Firestarter Group, who is a Rice alum and a Russian immigrant. Our project is working with communities to humanize and give a face to the experiences most of us don’t know about. Harris County receives more refugees than any other county in a state that received more refugees than any other in the country last year. Houston is the world right now. — Ryan Holeywell, Mar. 2
Read the full interview on the Rice Magazine website.