Social support networks,instant messaging,and gender equity in refugee education

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses the role of instant messaging chat groups to support teacher training and gender equity initiatives in Kenyan refugee camps. Our findings are based on survey data with refugee teachers in Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps (n?=?203), group interviews with refugee teachers in Kakuma (n?=?21), and interviews with international instructors of teacher training programs in Nairobi, Toronto, and Vancouver (n?=?14). In our analysis, we apply amplification theory, feminist science and technology studies paradigms, and considerations of transnational approaches to understand the use of instant messaging among refugee teacher communities. Our framework explores how social and cultural norms are amplified through transnational text and instant messaging related to teacher training and in support of gender equity. Peer-to-peer group chats draw on transnational learning opportunities and expand these engagements through group chats between men and women refugee teachers across camps as well as through community engagement about gender equity initiatives in education. International instructors identify both value and hesitation in navigating the quantity and content of these communications, such as learning more about refugee teachers’ daily lives in the camps and concern about following and managing the amount of communication that can ensue over chat groups. Our work has practical implications for transnational teacher training programs in refugee camps, illuminates how mobile technology and chat groups allow women and men in the community to engage and support girls’ education, and questions how text messaging affects the lived and day-to-day experiences of women refugee teachers.     

Making sense of collective identity and trauma through drawing: the case study of a Palestinian refugee student

Abstract

Identity construction can be very complex for refugee children, especially for Palestinian refugee children. For refugee children, organised violence and immigration are important parts of their life experience that can lead to trauma, which in turn influences how they construct their collective identity. Schools have to consider this specific experience as the development of a meaningful identity is an important factor in refugee students’ well-being and school adjustment. School-based activities centred on creative expression can help refugee students in expressing trauma and in making sense of their identity and migration experience. This paper presents the case study of a 9-year-old Palestinian refugee boy in Canada and explores how he expressed and made sense of his multiple identities in his drawings. Many features of the boy’s drawings evoked a wounded identity, especially spatial disorganisation and enmeshment. Data analysis revealed that the boy might have been experiencing collective identity trauma and that he used drawing and a peer as props to heal his wounded identity. Both drawing and the space offered by his teacher to safely explore and experiment with different identities contributed to the integration of his multiple identities into a meaningful whole, which contributed to his school adjustment.     

‘Closure’ at Manus Island and carceral expansion in the open air prison

ABSTRACT

Manus prison was officially closed in 2017 following Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) Supreme Court decision that the existence of the camp breached the PNG Constitution. The ‘Namah’ decision was significant in signalling and seeking to curb the imperial reach of Australian law but insufficient in resolving the question of refugee imprisonment. Far from ending the imprisonment of refugees, the closure following the judicial ruling has facilitated the expansion of the imperial carcerality that has characterized Australia’s immigration detention policy since 1992. By revealing how refugee incarceration has been extended and offshore processing instantiated following the closure of Woomera camp in 2003, we argue that official closures of refugee camps Woomera and Manus have been constitutive of carceral expansion that is imperial in form and that reiterates patterns of colonial violence. After tracking imperial expansion, we make a call for prison abolition in the refugee incarceration arena as this is a critical decolonizing strategy.     

Pathways to Self-Sufficiency: Successful Entrepreneurship for Refugees

ABSTRACT

This study examined the successes and challenges of refugee entrepreneurs by interviewing 50 refugees, service providers, and technical assistance providers. Qualitative data analyses revealed that successes and challenges occurred both at the individual and family levels as well as at the community and agency levels. The findings underscore the need to acknowledge the importance of the personal characteristics of the individual entrepreneurs, to deal with the competing factors revolved around family commitments, to encourage agencies to provide sufficient literacy and financial training, and to have community collaborations for capacity-building.     

Democratizing the Refugee Regime Complex

This article considers how civil society organizations (CSOs) may be understood in relation to the global refugee regime complex. It describes how several leading scholars have conceptualized refugee/internally displaced person (IDP) governance and explores how the neoliberal cognitive frame is impeding the possibility of democratic agency among IDPs/refugees. It argues that CSOs can play essential roles in encouraging democratization of the refugee regime complex by working to reshape their prevailing frame or orientation. Civil society organizations can also work to foster critical reflexivity among the parties that govern refugees and within that population as well. As an example of one such effort, the article employs Fraser’s (Scales of justice: reimagining political space in a globalizing world. Columbia University Press, New York, 2010) democratization framework in a brief case analysis of the Sarvodaya Shramadana Deshodaya initiative in Sri Lanka that has sought to enable IDPs in that nation to embrace critical reflexivity to reimagine themselves as governing agents who can redefine state and international organization-based definitions of refugee protection. Overall, the analysis suggests that civil society organizations can act successfully and intentionally to open democratic spaces in which refugees/IDPs may find possibilities to exercise their innate agential possibility.     

The Role of Companion Animals Throughout the Family Life Cycle

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the roles that companion animals play in the lives of American families, and discusses how those roles change as families progress through the stages of the family life cycle. It highlights the importance of pets in the lives of children and the benefits they receive from such relationships. It also presents information regarding the role of a child that animals often assume within families that do not have children. This paper also discusses the impact that the death of a pet has on the family, and provides suggestions for social workers who assist families that have strong attachment to companion animals.     

Integrating Human Rights and Trauma Frameworks in Social Work with People from Refugee Backgrounds

Abstract

Social work practice informed by human rights and trauma frameworks can be empowering and enabling. While both frameworks are complex and contested, their implementation “from below” via praxis can maximise benefits for social work with people who have experienced trauma and human rights abuses, such as those from refugee backgrounds. This article presents an exploration of this practice approach through the presentation of the story of Zillah and Amman, a fictionalised composite of many real refugee experiences. Taking as examples the education and child protection systems, the discussion highlights how theory to practice integration requires cross-cultural engagement, critical reflection, dialogue, and an understanding of human rights “from below”.     

Visual methodologies for research with refugee youth

Abstract

In the current moment of social, political, economic and environmental disquiet, unprecedented numbers of children have been forced to leave their homes and settle in new communities. As schools worldwide receive increasing numbers of refugee youth, there is a pressing need for thoughtful educational research that inquires into the unique individual needs and experiences of displaced learners. Given that students’ journeys are shaped by movements across physical, cultural and linguistic spaces, we suggest that related scholarship might benefit from Third Space theory. Within this theoretical framework, neither language nor culture is static. Rather, both are continuously shaped through interactions – including those that are non-verbal. For students who may be learning in an unfamiliar language, visual methodologies offer a means and venue for communication. To explore how refugee youth might benefit from Third Space theory and visual methodologies, we first review scholarship that examines how children and schools negotiate educational space. We then describe a series of methodologies that scholars might consider when conducting research with refugee youth, including photovoice, fotonovela, digital storytelling and quilting. Significantly, pairing a Third Space theoretical framework with visual and participatory methodologies may address issues of language, power, vulnerability and ethics.     

Braided geographies: bordered forms and cross-border formations in refugee comics

ABSTRACT

This article offers a close analysis of a trilogy of ‘refugee comics’ entitled ‘A Perilous Journey’, which were produced in 2015 by the non-profit organisation PositiveNegatives, to conceive of comics as a bordered form able to establish alternative cross-border formations, or ‘counter-geographies’, as it calls them. Drawing on the work of Martina Tazzioloi, Thierry Groensteen, Jason Dittmer, Michael Rothberg and others, the article argues that it is by building braided, multi-directional relationships between different geographic spaces, both past and present, that refugee comics realise a set of counter-geographic and potentially decolonising imaginaries. Through their spatial form, refugee comics disassemble geographic space to reveal counter-geographies of multiple synchronic and diachronic relations and coformations, as these occur between different regions and locations, and as they accumulate through complex aggregations of traumatic and other affective memories. The article contends that we need an interdisciplinary combination of the critical reading skills of humanities scholars and the rigorous anthropological, sociological and theoretical work of the social sciences to make sense of the visualisation of these counter-geographic movements in comics. It concludes by showing how the counter-geographies visualised by refugee comics can subvert the geopolitical landscape of discrete nation-states and their territorially bound imagined communities.     

Best practices: intercultural integration of Arabic refugees in Berlin

Abstract

The paper presents the work of a Berlin-based NGO (ANE) in Germany, which works with migrants and Arab refugees. The organisation has a strong record publishing a Parents Newsletter and conducting family counselling for migrants and refugees in Berlin. One of the major activities of the organisation in 2016 was an international conference with different German NGOs working with refugees. The conference was dedicated to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and developmental traumatic stress disorder (DTSD) of refugee children.     

Subjectivation,agency and the schooling of raced and dis/abled asylum-seeking children in the Italian context

Abstract

This paper intends to address the challenges that the Italian education system is facing in terms of policies and practices relating to dis/abled asylum-seeking and refugee children, in order to make sense of the politics of daily life inside schools and the network of social services for forced migrants, and to pay renewed attention to the notion of ‘social and educational integration’. The starting point of this paper is the idea that the current model of schooling for asylum-seeking and refugee children is implicated in the making of particular sorts of ‘subjects’, as well as the creation of educational and social exclusions and inequalities. Schools, refugee organisations as well as the work of educators and social workers can be important sites of ‘counter-politics’. Borrowing from the theoretical tools offered by Dis/Ability Critical Race Studies (Dis/Crit) framework and engaging with Judith Butler’s understanding of processes of subjectivation, the paper explores how asylum-seeking and refugee students can be rendered subjects outside the educational endeavour, or indeed outside studenthood. Data from an ongoing constructivist grounded theory doctoral research project, interviews with asylum-seeking children and with professionals working in different refugee services in Rome, are offered to substantiate the argument presented in this paper.     

Lessons Learned from Programs for Unaccompanied Refugee Minors

SUMMARY

A policy for priority admissions and subsequent care of unaccompanied refugee entrant minors was established in 1978 in response to the influx of Southeast Asian refugee minors. This article describes the child welfare system's response and workers' experiences in meeting the needs of this population. Lessons learned can be applied to permanency planning for children from varying cultural backgrounds.     

Supervisors’ Perception of Vicarious Trauma and Growth in Australian Refugee Trauma Counsellors

ABSTRACT

Vicarious trauma is a well-accepted phenomenon supported by more than 20 years of research, yet the body of research on the positive impact, known as vicarious post-traumatic growth, is relatively small. Based on a metasynthesis of qualitative peer-reviewed vicarious trauma studies, Cohen and Collens propose a model of the co-occurrence of vicarious trauma and vicarious post-traumatic growth. This model was examined through a qualitative study involving 11 interviews with supervisors of refugee trauma counsellors working in Forum of Australian Services for Survivors of Torture and Trauma (FASSTT) member agencies. This research project both reviewed the model from the perspective of experienced supervisors and illuminated what occurred within the supervision process to manage vicarious trauma and encourage vicarious post-traumatic growth. While the research project affirmed aspects of the model, the failure of the model to consider socio-political factors limited its applicability to FASSTT agencies.

IMPLICATIONS

• FASSTT clinical supervisors engage in supervision in a manner that may assist counsellors to process how their clients’ trauma disclosures impact on their levels of stress and change their perception of self, their role, and their worldview.

• Including recognition of the influence of the socio-political context of refugee trauma and trauma recovery may be an important additional component of supervision practice.

     

Work–family conflict: comparing the experiences of Turkish and native Belgian women

ABSTRACT

While research has focused on a number of dimensions of work–family conflict (WFC), hardly any literature exists that analyses how differences in family systems might help to explain variations in WFC experiences. By employing Reher’s typology of strong and weak family ties to integrate existing research and identify unaddressed features, this study finds that researchers have generally understudied the role of structural family ties on WFC. Qualitative data gathered from interviews with highly educated native Belgian and Turkish immigrant women living in Belgium are used to analyse variation in the WFC experiences and coping strategies of these two groups. The results suggest that a number of interconnected factors related to family systems – including internalisation of gender roles, division of family-related responsibilities, support mechanisms and external pressures from family and society, and socialisation processes of minority women in both family structures – are highly significant in explaining variations in women’s WFC experiences.     

Implications for Practice: Exploring the Impacts of Government Contracts on Refugee Settlement Services in Rural and Urban Australia

This article presents the findings from a small qualitative study of Refugee Settlement Service (RSS) workers under Australia’s Humanitarian Settlement Services and Settlement Grants Program. Managers and front-line workers from five Refugee Settlement Services in rural and urban New South Wales were interviewed to examine the impact of new Government funding structures and contracts on the delivery of services and supports to newly arrived refugees. The comparative findings show that the Government’s contractual arrangements impact Refugee Settlement Services in different ways; ultimately prioritising market-like structures and undermining their core service roles. We argue that improving the relationship between Government and Refugee Settlement Services is critical to successful refugee settlement.

IMPLICATIONS

• Successful refugee settlement requires greater flexibility and responsiveness in rural and urban Refugee Settlement Service (RSSs).

• RSSs require increased autonomy and control over funding to enable locally responsive service provision for newly arrived refugees.

     

Bridging between academia and the workplace: lessons learned about translational research on work-family balance

ABSTRACT

Balancing work and family is a continuous and growing challenge, requiring carefully chosen coping strategies. In spite of the growing amount of research on work-family balance, successful, long term solutions are still not readily available to most workers who are trying to cope with the tensions involved in fulfilling both work and family roles. One possible explanation for this lack of translation of research findings in applied settings may lie in how we do work-family research. The present research note presents translational research as a solution to bridge academia and the workplace. More specifically, it shares our experience of a participatory approach to translational research that was adopted in an interdisciplinary research project on work-family balancing strategies. The main objective of this research note is to provide an example of how translational research was carried out in this kind of community-initiated study, and how this approach can facilitate short-term, concrete applications of the knowledge gained from and with the research partners.     

Fathers in Prison

ABSTRACT

The parenting roles and responsibilities of incarcerated men have not traditionally been considered an important public concern. The impact of criminal justice policies and practices on family functioning has rarely been addressed by policy makers or family scholars and men's family obligations have not been a priority for the individuals responsible for the safety and security of correctional institutions. Similarly, and with few exceptions, fathers in prison have been out of sight and out of mind of community organizations concerned with family life and children's wellbeing. Several recent developments challenge this historical approach to handling parental incarceration and responsible fatherhood initiatives involving incarcerated fathers are being promoted. This article examines the individual and societal issues that must be addressed if responsible fatherhood among incarcerated men is to become a serious social goal. It presents an overview of the complex family roles and relationships of incarcerated men and describes ways in which individual situations and family preferences affect their ability to function as parents. Analyses of prison location strategies and communication regulations and the post-release environment are used to show how public policies influence and shape family relationships and responsible fatherhood. The article concludes with an agenda for research to guide informed and humane policy decisions.