Sara McKinnon's talk "Gendering the Refugee Crisis" suggests that we must think differently about gender in addressing the global refugee crisis. She suggests that we need to challenge a fixation on categorization as the basis of determining who counts as a refugee, and also think much more widely as systematically about how gender impacts one's need to seek asylum and refuge in a new country.

Sara L. McKinnon is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Politics & Culture in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research and teaching focuses intercultural rhetoric, globalization studies, and gender studies. She is the author of Gendered Asylum: Race and Violence in U.S. Law and Politics (University of Illinois Press, 2016), which charts the incorporation of gender provisions in US refugee and asylum law within the context of broader national and global politics.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx