From 2012 to 2015 I conducted research exploring the experiences of resettlement of a group of Colombian and Palestinian refugees in Chile and Brazil ( Vera Espinoza 2015 , 2017 , 2018a , 2018b ). The research methodology used a qualitatively
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Lessons from Refugees
Research Ethics in the Context of Resettlement in South America
Marcia Vera Espinoza
Every Campus A Refuge
A Small College’s Engagement with Refugee Resettlement
Diya Abdo and Krista Craven
response to that call, after we asked ourselves a simple question: why can’t a campus be like a parish and temporarily host refugees, assisting them in resettlement in the local area? Parishes (small cities or towns) and university and college campuses are
Sophie Nakueira
Nakivale, the oldest refugee camp in Uganda, hosts refugees fleeing various forms of political unrest from several African countries. Uganda’s humanitarian framework makes it an attractive place for refugees. Little is known about the role that humanitarian policies play in shaping interactions between different actors or the politics of accusation that emerges within this settlement. In a context in which the status of a refugee can confer preferential access to scarce resources, different refugee communities struggle to define themselves, their neighbours and kin in terms of the camp’s humanitarian language. Describing the everyday anxieties that define life in the camp, this article shows how accusations become powerful resources that refugees draw upon to meet the criteria for resettlement to a third country, but also how these forms of humanitarian assistance rely on processes of exclusion that create endemic accusations of corruption, criminality and even witchcraft.
In The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2019
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 39–56
Governing through paperwork
Examining the regulatory effects of documentary practices in a refugee settlement
Sophie Nakueira
Documents play an important role in the lives of refugees. However, little is known about the extent to which documents regulate the everyday lives of refugees and the anxieties of obtaining relevant paperwork for refugees seeking resettlement in the Global North. Although their lives are regulated by paperwork, refugees also use documents strategically to legitimise various claims and entitlements. This article shows how refugees interface with the administrative processes that seek to regulate their stay. Therefore, documentary practices become important tools through which processes and objectives of migration governance can be examined. This article seeks to contribute further insights on how the deployment of documents entrenches discourses of vulnerability, the role that paper regimes play in (re)producing processes of exclusion through administrative processes in humanitarian aid contexts and the revelations of documentary practices or paper regimes about those who govern and those who are governed by these practices.
In Journal of Legal Anthropology
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2019
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 10–28
Living an Uncertain Future
Temporality, Uncertainty, and Well-Being among Iraqi Refugees in Egypt
Nadia El-Shaarawi
While displacement has always involved the refiguring of space, scholars of forced migration have recently begun to consider how temporality might be crucial to an understanding of displacement. In this article, I consider the interplay of temporal and spatial uncertainty in the experience of exile for Iraqi refugees in metropolitan Cairo. By examining how Iraqis understand displacement as uncertain and how this uncertainty is a cause of significant distress, I show that an attunement to temporality can help us to understand refugees' experiences of displacement. Iraqi refugees spoke of exile in Cairo as 'living in transit'—a condition in which disjuncture between their expectations about exile and its realities contributed to an altered experience of time in which the future became particularly uncertain and life was experienced as unstable. One solution sought by refugees is resettlement, a process that often renders the future even more uncertain, at least in the short term.
The Boy on the Beach
The Fragility of Canada's Discourses on the Syrian Refugee "Crisis
Petra Molnar
The contours of Canadian refugee policies have in recent years fluctuated from a narrative of 'bogus' refugees requiring a tough approach of interdiction to one of urgent humanitarian assistance. These rapid discursive shifts highlight the fragility of how Canada's humanitarian responses, and its place in the world, are conceptualized. Using the case study of Canada's responses to the Syrian conflict, this short paper argues that state responses must be critically interrogated in order to move away from homogenizing narratives grounded in tropes such as ‘fear’, ‘floods’ and ‘crisis’, which continue to impact how state, media, and public discourse handle the influx of refugees. Examining how the Canadian state performs its sovereignty in response to the Syrian conflict is instructive to reveal its broader nation-building projects, ones which utilize particular tropes of fear to justify suspicion and exclusion of bodies that have been cast as dangerous and uncontrollable. While Canada is once again presenting itself as a global leader in refugee and human rights issues, it remains to be seen whether these more humane policies can withstand the continuing millennial border anxieties of the West when facing the prospect of resettling increasingly large numbers of refugees.
High-rise social failures
Regulating technologies, authority, and aesthetics in the resettlement of Taipei military villages
Elisa Tamburo
environmental determinism, recent works have recentered the debate on the verticality and space compartmentalization of the high-rise, highlighting its segregation and seclusion. For instance, in her ethnography of resettlement to high-rise blocks in the
Conservation-Induced Resettlement
The Case of the Baka of Southeast Cameroon—A Variation on the Habitual Mobility–Immobility Nexus
Harrison Esam Awuh
. These people have been subjected to a drastic resettlement program characterized by forced immobilization, which had deep effects on Baka sociality and well-being. 6 For the purpose of this article, in which we try to understand the social forms of
J.L. Black
In the debates surrounding the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway was used as a model. This article traces how eyewitness accounts of Canadian settlement patterns were used by Russian entrepreneurs to argue the case for the financing and organisation of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Given the tense international political climate at the end of the 19th century, the Trans-Siberian also became a focus for imperial rivalry. This article gives a good overview of comparative colonial enterprise in two great continental colonies.
From “Clan” to Speech Community
Administrative Reforms, Territory, and Language as Factors of Identity Development among the Ilimpii Evenki in the Twentieth Century
Nadezhda Mamontova
Translator : Jenanne K. Ferguson
formation. However, as I accumulated field and archival material, I realized that it was also necessary to include issues such as the link between the use of language and “clan” organization, to address aspects of the historical origin and resettlement of