Tune into WESU 88.1FM Middletown Mondays starting Feb. 24, 2020, 1:30-2pm for Roots and Routes: Conversations on Displacement and Belonging.

Roots and Routes: Conversations on Displacement and Belonging is a radio show bringing stories of exile, homeland, and belonging from all over the world, from Taiwan to Turkey, from Bosnia to Bangladesh. The show is researched and produced by students of the service-learning (SL) course “RELI213 Refugees & Exiles: Religion in the Diaspora.”

Recent years have seen the on-going tragic refugee crisis, with millions of people being displaced because of war and ecological disasters. “Refugees and Exiles” deals with the meaning of exile, displacement, and diaspora through three perspectives: philosophical, historical, and literary perspectives, using a range of case studies from the contemporary Syrian refugee crisis to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. Professor Yaniv Feller taught this class as an SL course for the first time in Fall 2018, after realizing that students wanted to be more engaged in the subject matter beyond just writing papers. The course is project-based: students choose their own topics, find people to interview, and create 15-minute radio segments.

The show will air weekly, every Monday at 1:30pm throughout the semester. The topics this season represent a diversity of themes ranging from Iranian LGBTQ+ refugees to the music of the Latvian diaspora in New York.

Some large recurring themes are, activism, human rights, and the arts. After each show airs, they will be archived for later listening.

Learn more about Service-Learning here.