(FEM7a) A Decolonial Reimagining of the Refugee Experiences

This session will explore the global dimensions of refugee experiences to counter the western-centric discourses on refugee labels and identities. It will challenge and depart from the hegemonic meanings of refugee identity and foreground the colonial and racial continuities embedded in the refugee discourse. Although the intersectionality lens is already being used by scholars to recognize diverse identities of refugees, intersectionality theories often reflect a western epistemological gaze. While not denying their theoretical contributions, this session proposes expanding the existing intersectionality debates and enriching them with alternative epistemologies and paradigms - emerging from multiple global geo-political scenarios, refugee movements, gendered experiences, asylum policies, refugee politics and subjectivities. Tags: Feminism, Gender, Migration and Immigration

Organizers: Mohita Bhatia, Saint Mary's University, Evangelia Tastsoglou, Saint Mary's University; Chair: Evangelia Tastsoglou, Saint Mary's University

Presentations

Mohita Bhatia, Saint Mary's University

Decolonizing the Discourse: Voices of Hindu Refugees from Western India

The refugee discourse has remarkably widened its scholarly contours to include varied voices and theoretical possibilities, thus questioning the victim-centric and monolithic descriptions of refugees. Despite this expanded theoretical richness and an attempt to understand refugee experiences from a bottom-up perspective, this scholarship is still somehow embedded in a West-centric conceptual framework. The diverse voices of refugees are still emerging from a ‘Western gaze’ that continues to use ‘victim-survivor’, ‘citizen-non/citizen’, ‘legal-illegal’, and ‘insider-outsider’ dichotomies, often in subtle if not in overt ways. The intricate nature of refugees lives and their politics often defies these neat political categorizations and binaries. In an attempt to decolonize and ‘unlearn’ the hegemonic refugee discourse, my paper will focus on Hindu refugees in Western India and bring to light the liminality of their everyday practices. It will point to refugee experiences that transcend and problematize some of the dominant vocabularies and dichotomies. This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Barmer in Rajasthan - in Western India. Barmer represents the Western Indian border with Pakistan, and is ‘home’ to many Hindu refugees migrating from Pakistan. Using a decolonial lens, this paper argues that colonial history and partition of the Indian subcontinent (into two separate nations - India and Pakistan) cannot be overlooked when understanding the refugee experiences in South Asia. Colonial constructions and the partition memories continue to shape refugees’ claims and performances; and rupture the ‘victim-survivor’, ‘insider-outsider’, ‘citizen-non-citizen’ and ‘legal-illegal’ binaries. Hindu refugees use the historical context of partition to contest borders and claim a fluid, non-permanent idea of ‘home’ - that could be in ‘India’ or ‘Pakistan’ contingent on their various factors, including their memories, contemporary mobilities and political expressions. Through their claims and assertions, the refugees challenge the bordered legalities and shape a more ambiguous insider-outsider and citizen-non-citizen national discourse. This paper will foreground the voices and performances of the Hindu refugees that enable us to imagine ‘refugees’ and their socio-political practices from a decolonial and intersectional perspective. This paper will use an intersectional frame to question the idea of ‘refugees’ as a unified and cohesive category. It will analyze Hindu ‘refugees’ not as a monolith but as a heterogeneous group of people who are united by their common interests and religious or cultural identities; yet are differentiated in caste, class and gender contexts. This paper will argue that caste and religion are often important but overlooked identities in the global scholarship on refugees and migration. It will bring to light the centrality of these identity categories and examine how they differently shape refugees’ politics and claims

Safia Amiry, McGill University; Narjes Hashemi, McGill University

Journey of Resilience: Afghan Women's Educational Mobility Amid Forced Migration

Following the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban regime in 2021, Afghans, particularly Afghan women, were compelled to migrate. Upon arriving in their host countries, Afghan women demonstrated unwavering determination to assimilate into their new environments. Their commitment to education became evident as they actively pursued academic opportunities. However, this journey has proven to be far more challenging than anticipated. Similar to many of their other international student counterparts, Afghan women confront significant challenges, heightened by their countrys war and suffering. Cultural adaptation to a new environment, gender-based barriers, linguistic and communication roadblocks, and financial constraints are only a few examples. Afghan womens experiences are notably diverse, marked by intersectional complexities. Therefore, it is imperative to investigate how these experiences may shape and reshape thier identities within international education mobility, aiming to create a more inclusive and equal environment for all students. This qualitative research investigates the educational mobility of Afghan women in diaspora, particularly those who have experienced forced migration following the Talibans takeover of Afghanistan in 2021. The study delves into how their intersectional identities, including gender, ethnicity, religion, and socioeconomic status, shape their educational experiences. These Afghan womens educational journeys are further complicated by the challenges posed by political and economic conditions in refugee communities/host countries, which limit their access to education and employment opportunities while increasing the risk of discrimination and violence. Using an autoethnographic approach, we leverage our personal experiences as Afghan women who immigrated to Canada during two distinct Taliban occupation eras. Through self-reflection, journaling, and daily life observation, we provide nuanced insights into the multifaceted challenges faced by Afghan women during their forced displacement and migration. The findings offer a nuanced understanding of the experiences of Afghan women in the diaspora and their challenges within international education. These insights contribute to fostering a more diverse and inclusive discourse on international education.

Riann Lognon, University of Calgary

Co-designing and Documenting a Community Garden with Newcomer Youth

In this paper, we present how a community garden co-designed with 15 newcomer youth of color became a site for anti-racist storywork, and reimaginings of homes and gardens left behind as part of a community-engaged research initiative - the Youth Anti-Racism Integration (YARI)-Collective. YARI-Collective is a critical intersectional collaborative research project dedicated to centering the lived experiences of immigrant and refugee newcomer youth to re-imagine pathways towards more equitable futures in their resettlement journeys. Applying a Southern theoretical framework that acknowledges the geopolitical and social histories shaping the circumstances of the youths’ migration (Espiritu and Duong, 2018), this paper seeks to push beyond the paradigm of ‘culturally appropriate’ programming in community organizations and examine the potential decolonial and non-neoliberal aspects of community gardening with newcomers by creating a co-designed land-based project as a conduit for anti-racist and generative storytelling (Banerjee and Connell 2018, Banerjee et al., 2022). Throughout the season, we engaged in co-design as a methodology, in which participating newcomer youths’ voices were centered as we co-generated a gardening space. The co-design process fostered equitable participation among researchers and newcomer youth through iterative designing that is meaningful for all collaborators within their lifeworlds, expertise, and disciplinary focus. Centering a Southern feminist ethics of care (Banerjee et al., 2022), namely through the framework of deep care, we envisioned gardening work and the garden space as a site to express and negotiate individual and collective experiences. Banerjee et al. (2022) ground the concept of deep care in the care ethics and care labor taken on by marginalized communities in India because of the majoritarian oppression and disenfranchisement they experience. Deep care then is a praxis that orients care towards social and political action to center the voices and concerns of those who are invisibilised through majoritarianism. As research-facilitators, we attended closely to the youth narratives of forced migration and transnational displacement, iteratively generating ideas of “what works” for the youth participants and then collaborating on embodied engagements (for example, watering plants, sowing seeds and herbs, harvesting) and representational activities (for example, creation of artworks, creative re-imagination of the physical space) in and about the garden space. In the process of creating a garden together, the lives of the newcomer youth were reflected in the garden as it grew into a living representation of their stories of migration, their memories of homes and gardens in their homelands, and their hopes for our shared futures. To demonstrate how co-designing facilitated this storywork, we will present an analysis of the documentary film “Days in Shade and Sun”, shot in the garden throughout the season by team members in collaboration with newcomer youth, that capture the newcomer youths’ profound explorations of migration, identity, and belonging through stories shared during designing and growing of the garden. The explorations offer axiological re-orientations (Bang et al., 2016) from the perspectives of newcomer immigrant and refugee youth of color to what it means to belong to a community garden in the Global North. As explicated through the framework of deep care, these re-orientations demonstrate ways in which the various embodied engagements, representational activities and the storywork associated with the garden counter systematic erasures of subjectivities of the marginalized youth of color and center dignity and solidarity in spaces typically associated with a sense of othering.

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Non-presenting authors: Megha Sanyal, University of Calgary; Santanu Dutta, University of Calgary; Pallavi Banerjee, University of Calgary; Pratim Sengupta, University of Calgary; Newcomer Youth Research Team, University of Calgary