joshua j. kurz spent the summer conducting research and writing as a Visiting Scholar as part of the Mobilities, Borders, and Identity Research Group at the University of Oulu. joshua is currently engaged in a dissertation project entitled "The Figure of the Refugee" in OSU's Department of Comparative Studies. Aspects of this project explore immigration and refugee policing practices, the phenomena of bordering and border crossing, and historical conceptions of what it has meant within particular Western political theories to be an outsider, a migrant, a stranger. The goal of this project is to reconceptualize contemporary debates around political belonging through a careful exploration of the figure of the refugee in relation to the concept of the political. This is an image at the Berlin Wall where he stopped for a day between the Critical Migration and Border Regime Research Symposium in Kassel, Germany and his return to Oulu, Finland.