At his office in the University of Vermont's Old Mill building, Pablo Bose joked that he isn't much of an interior designer. His young daughter's drawings were scattered about the room. A poster of Harry Potter above the door was starting to yellow. A framed single-page art print from Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days — a gift from a student — lay on the floor. Bose had taken it down to put up a whiteboard. Bookshelves held DVDs of films such as Slumdog Millionaire, V for Vendetta, Wag the Dog and Shrek 2. Tucked in Bose's desk drawer were diaries written by his grandfather, the Islamic scholar M.L. Roy Choudhury, as he traveled through the Middle East in the 1930s through '50s. "One day, when I actually have time, I plan to write about him," said Bose, who was born in India but grew up in Canada. If the office décor spoke of a mélange of cultures, so does Bose's academic work. Since January, the associate professor of geography has been on travels of his own: across the United States to examine refugee resettlement in small cities for a project funded by the National Science Foundation. Bose has also been studying resettlement policies and practices in Canada for a project funded by a UVM REACH grant. Among other cities, his travels have taken him to Bowling Green, Ky., which presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway famously — and falsely — described as the site of a massacre by "radicalized" Iraqi refugees. Conway used that claim to justify President Donald Trump's executive order restricting travel and immigration, placing refugee resettlement under scrutiny. In the context of rising tensions over the role of newcomers in the U.S., Seven Days asked Bose what he has learned from his interviews with resettlement agencies and state coordinators. Bose also shared the results of the Vermonter Poll, an annual survey of about 650 households across the state conducted by the UVM Center for Rural Studies. SEVEN DAYS: What sparked your interest in refugee studies? PABLO BOSE: One of the reasons I've been interested in refugee issues for a long time is because my family, in 1946, were refugees coming from what is today Bangladesh. My family is a Hindu family, a large number of whom were killed during a massacre at the family compound. The rest came and were officially refugees in Calcutta, in…
At his office in the University of Vermont's Old Mill building, Pablo Bose joked that he isn't much of an interior designer. His young daughter's drawings were scattered about the room. A poster of Harry Potter above the door was starting to yellow. A framed single-page art print from Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days — a gift from a student — lay on the floor. Bose had taken it down to put up a whiteboard. Bookshelves held DVDs of films such as Slumdog Millionaire, V for Vendetta, Wag the Dog and Shrek 2. Tucked in Bose's desk drawer were diaries written by his grandfather, the Islamic scholar M.L. Roy Choudhury, as he traveled through the Middle East in the 1930s through '50s. "One day, when I actually have time, I plan to write about him," said Bose, who was born in India but grew up in Canada. If the office décor spoke of a mélange of cultures, so does Bose's academic work. Since January, the associate professor of geography has been on travels of his own: across the United States to examine refugee resettlement in small cities for a project funded by the National Science Foundation. Bose has also been studying resettlement policies and practices in Canada for a project funded by a UVM REACH grant. Among other cities, his travels have taken him to Bowling Green, Ky., which presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway famously — and falsely — described as the site of a massacre by "radicalized" Iraqi refugees. Conway used that claim to justify President Donald Trump's executive order restricting travel and immigration, placing refugee resettlement under scrutiny. In the context of rising tensions over the role of newcomers in the U.S., Seven Days asked Bose what he has learned from his interviews with resettlement agencies and state coordinators. Bose also shared the results of the Vermonter Poll, an annual survey of about 650 households across the state conducted by the UVM Center for Rural Studies. SEVEN DAYS: What sparked your interest in refugee studies? PABLO BOSE: One of the reasons I've been interested in refugee issues for a long time is because my family, in 1946, were refugees coming from what is today Bangladesh. My family is a Hindu family, a large number of whom were killed during a massacre at the family compound. The rest came and were officially refugees in Calcutta, in…