(FEM7b) Refugee Practices: Intersectional, Feminist & Other Decolonial Approaches

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: Féminisme, Genre, Migration et Immigration

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

Presentations

Deepa Nagari, York University

Quandaries of Refugee Protection: The Canada-US Safe Third Country Agreement

The Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) between the United States (US) and Canada has been a source of dissent since it came into force in 2004. Although not a new debate, there have been recent vital advancements in the conversation (the STCA has been upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada, the Roxham Road crossing was closed, and the agreement was expanded to include all border crossings). Civil society and migrant organizations are at the forefront of the debate, arguing that eliminating the STCA is imperative for improving conditions for potential asylum seekers. However, there seems to be a continuous denial by the Canadian and US governments of the realities and implications of the agreement. Moreover, safe third-country mechanisms are being consolidated and emerging globally as popular legal and political tools to prevent potential asylum seekers from claiming asylum in their country of choice, forcibly returning them to a transit country instead and the rise of these mechanisms reveals a push toward the perpetual externalization of forced migrants by nation-states (particularly in the Global North). Examining the Canadian border and bordering practices highlights a quandary within refugee law and protection regimes, wherein bordering and migration governance deem certain people deserving and undeserving, undermining the legal rights of refugees, forced migrants, and asylum seekers under international refugee law. It also brings up questions about the various roles in pathways to protection. The racial and exclusionary bias in the STCA and Canadian bordering practices and migration governance are evident and are being explored. I want to further this investigation and examine the role of the general population in addressing the harm caused by the rise in these border management tools and explore the role of collective responsibility and engagement within forced migration laws and policies. Integrating insights from different approaches and theories, such as belonging and exclusion (including race and racialization), externalization practices and theory, and collective responsibility and engagement, adds an intersectional and nuanced perspective to forced migration and border studies beyond primarily examining the nation-state’s roles and responsibilities. My examination offers insight into how and why people fundamentally view the STCA and by extension certain groups of refugees and asylum seekers the way they do and why, despite our best interests, the general population remains removed from the suffering of those we deem “other”. My theoretical/methodological framework thus focuses on the efforts of grassroots movements (in Canada and generally) to close this proximity and fight for concrete solutions, and the importance of understanding humanity, precariousness, and grievability of human lives and suffering in the face of punitive border management and forced migration policies. With recent questions surrounding refugee protection and shouldering responsibility, we have seen the difference in responses by states and the population towards certain types of refugees (for example, with the Ukraine and Afghanistan refugees). This sheds some light on the excuse that countries in the Global North constantly propose: they do not have the capacity or the means to bring in more refugees and forced migrants. However, they have shown numerous times the ability and means to produce robust protection mechanisms for refugees fleeing from conflict rapidly, and these countries absolutely can host refugees either temporarily or permanently. Moreover, forced migration laws and policies primarily focus on identifying refugees, determining who should shoulder refugee protection (which primarily falls to nation-states), and how the “burden” of protection should be distributed. However, the reliance and gaze toward the Global North to protect the world’s refugee population are futile. Instead, this is a question of our collective response to the refugee crisis, forced migration, and dispossession. We should instead be focusing on grassroots movements, efforts by civil society organizations, mobilization of efforts on the ground, lessons from diverse experiences and scholars, and decenter forced migration experiences from the hegemony of what refugee protection looks like, evident in the language of law, politics, and even studies of refugees and forced migration. Rather, we should challenge contemporary capitalism and colonialism, by examining the root causes of displacement and looking at the realities of historical routes, geographies, conditions, and borders.

Evangelia Tastsoglou, Saint Mary's University

Beyond Western Gaze: Locating Subjectivities of Asylum-Seeking Women in the Eastern Mediterranean

This paper derives from an empirical study of asylum-seeking women survivors of gender-based violence arriving through the Eastern Mediterranean route to Greece in the second decade of the 21st century. Through qualitative in-depth interviews of 20 key informants and 35 women arriving from diverse African and Middle-Eastern countries, the journeys to “safety” in the EU are being focused to investigate and interrogate the ways in which the agency and resilience of these women defies stereotypical Western assumptions about gender and refugees from generalized or gender-based violence. Non-conventional narratives, with unexpected twists in harrowing journeys, camps and transit spaces or “settlement” in urban jungles are foregrounded and analyzed to reveal the humanity and subjectivities of these women who are neither passive victims nor heroic survivors, as the Western gaze portrays them. Using feminist, intersectional and de-colonial perspectives we present the GBV asylum-seeking women in Greece as human beings, sometimes fighting and resisting, but also aquiescing, negotiating, connecting with others and recruiting allies, making strategic choices under highly constraining circumstances and limited options, adapting and changing themselves in the process. Instances of racism and legal status discrimination are considered from the viewpoint, experiences and identities of women while their intersections with gender and social class are discussed.