On one wall of an elevator at NYU Abu Dhabi, there’s a poster that reads: Where are you for January Term? Berlin, London or Florence? Some of us are Global Education Officers, paid to advise freshmen on whether to choose Buenos Aires or Madrid if they want to practice their Spanish. Between fall breaks and class trips, J-Terms and debate tournaments, traveling is a fundamental pivot around which life at NYUAD revolves. It is a method through which we — as students and alumni — take pride in our school; it is what we elaborately detail in our graduate school applications and employment interviews, it’s what our promotional brochures use to distinguish NYUAD from other universities and it’s the promise that lures us in at Candidate Weekends.

Right next to the poster for J-Terms, however, will be another poster titled The Migrant and Refugee Crisis in Europe. And another one, asking: Can we build sustainable, scalable social enterprises that restore the rights and dignity of 10 million refugees by 2022? And another one, headlined Body Voices 2016: Narrating Migration. Beyond our Instagram feeds and the increasing number of visas in our passports, our geographic location is a consistent reminder that human movement does not only encompass leisure travel, empathetic multiculturalism and a drive toward cosmopolitanism. Across the Arab world, and in our broader region, cities continue to experience mass human displacement due to political conflicts. We need to consciously remind ourselves that these global movements and displacement issues are not removed or independent from us — they impact many in our community on a personal level.

Through the Travel and Displacement issue of The Gazelle, we hope to move beyond our collective — but surface-level — globetrotter, and to spark conversation about bigger issues centering on migration and global displacement. In addition, we hope to give voice to the experiences and connections that we make when we travel, to new and old places, for both leisure and study.