As part of the Camden Conference Series of Community Events, the Blue Hill Library and Blue Hill Books are cosponsoring an author talk with Colby College Associate Professor Nadia El-Shaarawi on Thursday, December 4 at 7PM in the library's Howard Room. Join for a discussion on refugees and displacement in the Middle East, and of Nadia's recently released book, Collateral Damages.  

More than twenty years after the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, there has yet to be a meaningful public reckoning with the war. Collateral Damages brings Iraqi stories—which have been systematically excluded from dominant Western narratives of the war—to the fore. Drawing on a decade of ethnographic fieldwork, Nadia El-Shaarawi traces Iraqis' experiences of the 2003 invasion and the violence and displacement that followed, from urban exile in Cairo to efforts to rebuild by pursuing third-country resettlement—often in the very country responsible for them becoming refugees. Iraqis' theorizations of war and displacement illuminate how prevailing histories and memories of both the Iraq War and the larger Global War on Terror can be understood as imperial unknowing—epistemological and relational practices by which imperial power produces conditions of ignorance, hubris, obfuscation, and a willful turning away. Iraqis' accounts draw attention to that which empire prefers to keep hidden and offer possibilities for knowing the social and political effects of war differently.

Nadia El-Shaarawi is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at Colby College. At Colby, she teaches courses on refugees and migration, humanitarianism, and global health. She is a cultural and medical anthropologist who specializes in transnational forced migration, humanitarianism, and mental health in the Middle East and North Africa and Europe. She is currently working on two research projects. First, her current book project focuses on how Iraqi refugees in Cairo, Egypt negotiated uncertain conditions of protracted urban exile and how interactions with transnational and local humanitarian institutions and policies, especially refugee resettlement, had implications for mental health and well-being. The second project (in collaboration with Professor Razsa), Insurgent Mobilities, is an ethnography of the Balkan route that tells the story of the migrants who challenged and circumvented borders in their efforts to reach Europe in a struggle for what they and their activist allies called freedom of movement. Prior to joining Colby, Nadia was the Global Migration Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, where her work included collaborative research on the health and social effects of displacement and resettlement. Nadia received her PhD in Anthropology and her MPH in International Health from Case Western Reserve University.

This event is presented in anticipation of the 39th Annual Camden Conference, “Today’s Middle East: Power, Politics, & Players” taking place live from the Camden Opera House from February 20 – 22, 2026. To learn more about the conference, please visit www.camdenconference.org/. This program is free and open to all, and for more information please contact the library at 374-5515 or email Assistant Director Kayleigh Thomas at kayleigh.thomas@bhpl.net.  Blue Hill Books will be onsite with copies of the book available for purchase.