Refugeeness

This Rahmenpapier of my habilitation discusses the performativity approaches of Bourdieu and Butler as reflexive research perspectives on the social construction of migrant and refugee identities. Focusing on the performativity of speech acts and emotionalized enactments, I employ empirical data examples about commodified and familial care work that reveals how migration and refugeeness are constituted in micro-level face-to-face interactions. Introducing the concepts of doing, undoing and not doing migration/refugeeness, I show different care performances that reproduce, transform or subvert social identities in the interplay of individual agency with the social regulation by institutional, organizational and discursive structures of the national migration, asylum and integration regimes. Throughout the paper, I argue that the social order of migration/refugeeness is biopolitical and postcolonial: drawing on historical images of orientalism, social positions of internal others are constituted and simultaneously subordinated to the majority society. Regulated by biopolitical means of administration and disciplining, social processes of doing of migration/refugeeness generate affective values in the images of internal and external others, who supposedly depend on the care and control of the hegemonic nation. When ‘migrant/refugee workers’ are used as an effective and economical solution to the increasing labor demand of the nation and when ‘refugee families’ become a commodity on the national market of public and private social services, the social order of migration/refugeeness materializes in productive values that benefit the nation state.

This article argues that the lived experiences and challenges of the Vietnamese community in Toronto are not reflected in the social work literature that continues to represent them as exceptional refugees. Over forty years after the fall of Saigon, a qualitative research study, “Discrimination in the Vietnamese Community, Toronto,” reveals that the Vietnamese community continues to experience intergroup conflicts stemming from war- and displacement-mediated identities of region, class, and temporal periods of migration. A critical review of the social work literature, using the theoretical lens of critical multiculturalism, traces the construction of the Vietnamese Canadians as successful “boat people” as part of the larger narrative of multiculturalism. This discourse of exceptionalism allows the needs of those who fall outside the constructed identity to remain unseen and underserved. Participant responses from this small pilot study will inform future investigation into the impa...

This study offers an encompassing analysis of labour market experiences of Muslim immigrants in the GTA. A qualitative research method was used to explore whether the events of September 11 has impacted the labour market integration of Muslim immigrants in Canada. The findings are based on the responses of 6 first generation Muslim immigrants who were interviewed for this study. At first the participants reported that their identity as a Muslim did not play a significant role in the labour market, however, their stories suggest some level of racial discrimination as a result of their religious affiliation. The findings suggest intersectionality among Credential recognition, Canadian experience and racism that work together to veil racist activities that Muslim individuals encounter. This study highlights the state and accreditation institutions as key players that keep the immigrant out of the highly desired occupation to reserve these occupations for Canadian born and educated work...

The experiences of Syrian female refugees in Turkey are strongly characterized by a multifaceted quality of violence, which intersects with discrimination and other difficulties stemming from a lack of education, a lack of financial means, ethnicity, and the precarious situation of being a ›guest‹ in Turkey. In the scope of my master thesis research, I went to Şanlıurfa in order to find out more about their situation. I realized that the omnipresent violence certainly limits the field of possibilities that Syrian women in Şanlıurfa can move within. However, their narratives also showed that these limitations are not deterministic, they are breached and modified through eigensinnige (willful) interpretations that open up possibilities to act. They are active willful agents that develop strategies in their everyday life to circumvent violence, to protect themselves from it, and to resist.

While recognizing that ‘volunteering for refugees’ is entangled in ethical and political power dimensions, this article will discuss how we can ethnographically explore the everyday humanitarian practices of volunteers as shaped in intrinsic ways by their mode of being in the world as ethically concerned human beings. Building on recent scholarship within the anthropology of humanitarianism in which local and everyday versions of humanitarian practice are foregrounded, we wish to further the understanding of everyday volunteer practices through establishing a lens of temporality. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews among small-scale volunteer networks and NGOs in Greece and in Northern Europe working in response to the refugee influx to Europe since 2015, we suggest three different modalities of volunteering among non-professionals, which we designate: temporality of crisis, which concentrates on the impulse to help as an immediate response to a critical momen...

Although the Netherlands is renowned for its forerunner position in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/transsexual, and intersex (LGBTI) rights, this study urges one to question whether it can still live up to that image. Reports, news items, and signals from non-governmental organizations, such as Transgender Network Netherlands in the field show that especially transgender migrants/refugees regularly face abuse and discrimination. Yet, academic research underlying such findings is scarce. Moreover, a highly gendered discourse on the current migration/refugee crisis makes transgender migrants/refugees even more invisible. This article presents an interpretive approach to the institutional and disciplinary realities they become part of. The approach comes from (1) a literature review, surveying both scholarly publications and other sources; (2) patchwork or instant ethnography, thickening the findings from the literature; (3) and foremostly a theoretical interpretation of the preca...

The diversification of gender-based priorities and the necessities of refugees have led refugee NGOs to launch activities specifically for women, or urged women-only NGOs to take action particularly for refugee women in Turkey. Drawing upon a qualitative research in Gaziantep in Turkey, which host a large population of Syrian refugees, this study seeks to answer the question "How effective are NGOs in empowering Syrian refugee women in Turkey?" It is argued that NGOs working in the provision of assistance to refugees cannot be treated as a homogeneous group in terms of the degree and form of their influences on the empowerment of refugee women, and the individual NGO's standpoints may shape their effects. Data from interviews with NGO representatives and Syrian women who have received support from NGOs indicate that the NGOs' perceptions of women's issues and their contribution to the empowerment of women are closely linked to their type.

In the last few years, asylum claims based on sexual orientation and/or gender identity (SOGI) have received increased attention within migration and queer studies. Mostly focusing on the refugee status determination process, these works have emphasized how the expectations of asylum institutions about "genuine queer refugees" lead to the exclusion of many applicants from SOGI asylum. This paper aims at shifting the analysis perspective from the legal categorization process to the impacts of everyday experienced categories of "asylum seekers" or "refugees" on queer migrants in the Parisian area. Using a three-year long ethnographic fieldwork, completed through interviews with queer asylum seekers and refugees, this paper investigates how refugeeness, understood as the objective and subjective effects of migration and asylum policies on individuals, contributes to shaping lived experiences of sexual and gender minorities in France. By drawing attention to the ways that the multiple power relationships queer asylum seekers and refugees have to face are spatially grounded, this paper discusses how an intersectional understanding of sexuality, gender, and refugeeness allows us to emphasize the role played by migration status in the negotiation of hetero-and cisnormativity. This paper also argues that far from remaining passive toward the categorization process they are subjected to, queer asylum seekers and refugees strategically appropriate the administrative categories with which they are associated. Such an analysis of lived experiences of queer asylum seekers and refugees in the country of arrival thus highlights the complex reshaping of social location caused by migration.

In this paper, I search for new meanings of political action that have emerged around the so-called 'Summer of Welcome' in Germany in 2015, when more citizens than ever before were willing to volunteer for refugees by providing ostensibly 'apolitical' humanitarian help. In order to shed light on the volunteers' potentials to induce transformations towards a more egalitarian social and political order, I draw on several intriguing moments of my ethnographic field research in Southern Germany between 2014 and 2016. By doing so, I highlight how the volunteers-despite their ostensible self-understanding as 'apolitical' helpers-figure as Covert Activists, Change Agents or Political Dissidents. This will point at the dialectic relationship between 'the political' and 'the apolitical' and d emonstrate how the humanitarian provides new avenues for political interventions, resistance and activism in future struggles around migration.

This article presents an analysis of employment trajectories of refugee staff in migrant support and advocacy organisations in the UK, Austria and the Netherlands. In contrast to existing scholarship, it takes refugees’ success in finding employment as a starting point. Moreover, it makes an important contribution to extant literature by identifying the unique features of a niche employment sector for refugees: migrant support organisations. I demonstrate that the mainstream explanatory concepts of ‘labour market segmentation’ and ‘ethnic niche’ fail to capture refugees’ pathway from client to service provider and neglect the sector’s status as a mid- to high-skilled but feminised employment sector. I propose instead to understand ‘refugeeness’ as a form of capital and argue that this capital provides access to employment in migrant support and advocacy organisations, while simultaneously trapping refugees in front-line work with high degrees of hidden, devalued labour and inadequate career mobility.

This opinion article invites the reader to reflect about the processes that brought the inhabitants of the refugee and migrant 'Jungle' camp in Calais to develop agency over the construction and running of the camp. In engaging with this Journal's theme of " Refugees and Work " , we look at how the Calais' Jungle inhabitants gained direct involvement in the running of two key activities going on in the camp: the construction of shelters and schooling. As volunteers in the Calais' Jungle ourselves, we wrote this article by reordering first hand observations stemming from our participatory experience in the camp. Thus, we hope to provide readers with a direct account that, based on our participation and involvement, surely needs to be considered as informative as partial and biased by our own individual experience. In looking at the dynamics of interaction between the Jungle's inhabitants and other groups present in the camp, be them independent volunteers, established humanitarian organisations or border authorities and police, this article seeks to give testimony of the ways in which the camp's inhabitants negotiated their own involvement in organising life in the camp. At the same time rejecting the humanitarian logics of protection and dependence, as well as the security logics of policing and control, their presence and agency over the camp's activities, despite often problematic and conflicting, embodied their struggle against the France-UK border regime. Recognising this form of agency might be important when engaging with similar situations emerging in the future.

The experiences of Syrian female refugees in Turkey are strongly characterized by a multifaceted quality of violence, which intersects with discrimination and other difficulties stemming from a lack of education, a lack of financial means, ethnicity, and the precarious situation of being a ›guest‹ in Turkey. In the scope of my master thesis research, I went to¸Sanlıurfa in order to find out more about their situation. I realized that the omnipresent violence certainly limits the field of possibilities that Syrian women in¸Sanlıurfa can move within. However, their narratives also showed that these limitations are not deterministic, they are breached and modified through eigensinnige (willful) interpretations that open up possibilities to act. They are active willful agents that develop strategies in their everyday life to circumvent violence, to protect themselves from it, and to resist.

"This thesis will discuss the limitations and possibilities of sustainable citizenship and hospitality in the refugee camps of Grande-Synthe, France. It will contribute to a two-fold theoretical debate on border politics and humanitarian politics. Both European border policies and humanitarian aid organizations focus on the here and the now and ignore the shared histories and future dreams of full (legal) and bare (illegal) citizens. They reduce the last group to an anonymous mass of either criminals or suffering victims and stimulate thinking in terms of exclusion, enlarging the gap between us and them . Having spent one month in camp Basroch (the Jungle of Grande-Synthe ) and two months in camp La Linière ( the first official refugee camp of Europe ), I will draw on my own ethnographic experiences and daily conversations as a volunteer in the camp to illustrate the complex and nuanced ways in which both refugees and volunteers question the concepts of statelessness and national belonging and in negotiation (re)construct citizenship and care in relation to each other. It s a story about the numerous challenges that limit their hospitality and their powerful attempts to cross the borders that hold them apart."

In the context of the European research project "Collective action and the refugee crisis", I have spent several months interviewing activists who work on the denunciation , solidarity and support of migrants and refugees: in Barcelona, Madrid, and along the Spanish southern border; in Calais and in the entire region of Pas-de-Calais, and in Paris. And, finally, in Brussels. In Barcelona I have spoken to, among others, people from organizations such as Stop Mare Mortum, SOS Racisme, EICA, Fotomovimiento, activists in the districts of Raval and Sagrada Família, and others with no specific affiliation. I have also spoken to several people linked to institutional politics, in reference to political parties that are concerned about this issue as well as the Barcelona City Council. Even though they do not all share the same analysis of the causes and solutions, there is one point on which they unanimously agree: the refugee crisis is not actually a crisis of refugees. This term, popularized by the media in the spring and summer of 2015, is still the expression most often used to refer to the increase in the number of people that have been coming to the European Union in recent times seeking asylum. Since then, the vast majority of stakeholders, including politicians, NGOs, international organizations , journalists and university professors in a variety of disciplines have used the expression again and again. And they continue to do so. Oftentimes, when we hear or read it, we know instinctively that we do not like it, but we may not be able to explain exactly why not. As we shall see, there are many complementary answers. Some of the criticisms focus on the word "crisis" ; others, on the concept of "refugee"; others still, on the combination of the two words; and others, on the absence of alternative words that explicitly state the causes and those responsible for this situation.

Page 1. Critical research agendas within the Metropolis Project: Reflections on a study of precarious housing and hidden homelessness among refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in Montréal, Toronto and Vancouver Damaris Rose Professor, Urban Studies Université INRS, Centre – Urbanisation Culture Société Coordinator, Housing & Neighbourhoods domain Centre Métropolis du Québec – Immigration et Métropoles 2012-03-29 Colloquium - Collaborative Grad. Program in Migration & Ethnic Relations, U. of W.