Candace Lukasik, of Mississippi State's Department of Philosophy and Religion, will present "'Draining the Middle East of Christians': The Contested Politics of Migration among Egypt’s Copts" 1 p.m. Nov. 4 at Old Main Academic Center's Room 1200.

This talk will examine the contemporary conditions of Coptic Christian emigration from Egypt to the United States, focusing primarily on the Diversity Visa (also known as the Green Card Lottery). International media, Euro-American politicians and policymakers, and diasporic Middle Eastern Christians themselves have argued Christians in the region are facing extinction and are fleeing for their lives from the forces of rising religious extremism and sectarian violence. Based on 20 months of fieldwork between Egypt and the U.S. diaspora, this talk will unfold the contentious ethnographic texture of transnational migration for a Christian minority community in the Middle East. Instead of concluding whether such migration is either forced or voluntary, this talk will analyze how the exigency to decide the validity of such a narrative of flight shapes so many lives and policies of empire.