Jordana Silverstein is a Senior Research Fellow in the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness, and the granddaughter of Jewish Holocaust survivors and stateless refugees.

In this interview with Dylan Bird on Future Perfect, Jordana discusses the new oral history podcast Being Stateless, hosted by Jordana and produced at Melbourne University's Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness. Being Stateless is about people in Australia who have been stateless; their memories, experiences, and histories.

Article 1 of the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons defines "stateless person" as "a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law". Some people are legally stateless, others are 'de facto stateless', some have citizenship that they reject and consider themselves stateless, while others have citizenship somewhere but it doesn't align with their identity.

Jordana tells Dylan there were many different understandings and experiences of statelessness expressed by interviewees in the Oral Histories of Statelessness project, some of which then made it in to the podcast series. The first episode of Being Stateless series brings together various perspectives and voices, before the series moves in to individual interviewees.

"I'm hoping people hear this and hear stories of statelessness that they've never heard before. I think people don't don't really understand what statelessness is, and I hope that both people who have a clear idea of what it is and people who have no idea, I hope they come away from listening to this with a complicated idea of what statelessness is, that it's not one thing and that it's not experienced in one way and that stateless people aren't one kind of person," Jordana says.

"Stateless people have all kinds of relationships to place and to people, and also that we can all - whether you're stateless or not - you can learn a lot from these people who have experienced this incredible state violence, we can learn a lot from them about how to think about the world and how to think about the nation states that some of us take for granted."