Food and the Displaced: How Refugees transform food cultures in the Southwest

What roles do refugee restaurateurs, home cooks, professional chefs, caterers, content creators, and cookbook authors play in transforming food environments in the US Southwest? Through the medium of documentary filmmaking, this project amplifies the storied lives of refugees and their foodways, visually documenting recipes, stories, and histories of the growing refugee populations in Arizona. Advancing a growing field of critical refugee studies and scholarly interest in refugees and displacement, I consider Arizona as a site of refuge, especially as it has settled 100,000 refugees since 1980 and is consistently ranked in the top five receiving states in the last decade.