(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: Feminism, Gender, Migration and 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.

Jennifer Peruniak, University of Toronto

"This is how we keep our values alive": How Canadian Private Refugee Sponsors Make Sense of Challenges

Private sponsorship is an initiative that allows for refugees to resettle in Canada with support and funding from private and joint government-private sponsorship. “You are vulnerable by taking on the refugees” is a statement articulated by a sponsor, which encapsulates the highly intimate and complex dynamic within sponsorship. It requires an immense amount of time, energy, and care, taken upon by a group of people in order to help an unknown group of people in need. This paper analyzes 23 in depth semi-structured interviews with private sponsors of refugees in Ontario, these were conducted in person and on zoom before the COVID-19 pandemic. Interviews lasted between 1-2.5 hours. The sample includes a diverse mix of ages, gender, and educational backgrounds of sponsors. It examines the highly intimate relationship between sponsors and newcomer refugees as they aid in their settlement during their first 12 months in Canada. This research asks: how do sponsors navigate and cope with challenges of private sponsorship? It finds that sponsors navigate sponsorship through a white middle-class lens that idealizes Canada as a gift which they facilitate. Nguyen’s concept of the gift of freedom, whereby, liberal conceptions of freedom erase legacies of coloniality (2012), showcases the cyclical relationship between notions of gifts, and those who receive, are expressed through the triad of native/settler/alien. By studying how sponsors describe refugees, it reveals how such discussions contextualize broader discourse about Canadian landscape of immigrant and non-immigrant relations, underscored by power. The concept of Canada as a gift, one that is given or enacted upon by white citizens onto non-white immigrants, percolates beneath the surface of these interactions. Sponsors’ articulation of challenges highlights how the subjectivity of refugees’ post arrival, is viewed within a Westernized, Eurocentric lens. Findings indicate that sponsors enact their white middle class privilege within their actions toward refugees, which leads to tension within their relationship dynamic. Sponsors centre themselves within a perceived risk within the sponsorship relationship, despite refugees encountering greater personal, financial, and emotional risk through their experiences of migration. Thereby, despite their good intentions, sponsors who engage in this volunteer work reproduce white middle class understandings of how refugees should integrate, and thereby help reproduce, rather than mitigate inequality in Canada. Sponsors’ positions of privilege are fuelled by existing dimensions of power and are a site of power through which inequality is reproduced. Thus, intentions of individual actors to act on goodness do not combat the broader power structures. Logics of power are articulated through sponsors’ perceived challenges in the financial, cultural and gender dimensions. By examining the relationship between sponsors and refugees operating within an everyday realm, this paper shows how these intimate relations operate within a dialectic power structure that allow marginalized families to move across global space, but also reproduce the power of the white middle class in Canada. This research has important theoretical and policy applications for future private sponsors of refugees and adds nuance in understanding how these intimate dynamics operate.

Adela Kabiri, Memorial University

Afghan Refugee Women's Struggles of Adaptation in their Everyday Lives in the Canadian Context

This research seeks to determine how Afghan women newcomer refugees in Canada navigate their experience of the change of cultural context from Afghanistan to the new host environment. The structure of Afghan families privileges the dominance of men and elders. Even before the 2021 crisis, Afghan women had already been facing pressures due to the prevailing laws in families that forced them to respect patriarchal decisions. Connell claimed that those benefiting from inequalities have an interest in defending them. Those who bear the costs are interested in ending them. Considering the context of the Afghan family and Connells claim, potentially, the cultural adaptation of Afghan women in the context of Canada may conflict with the interests of other family members. So, there is a possibility of cultural resistance in this case, when a family may create limitations for Afghan women in their social interactions in the Canadian context. Reconciling the new cultural context with expectations from their families can keep them in a long-term cultural shock that includes a flurry of emotions, including excitement, anxiety, confusion, and uncertainty. The U-curve theoretical model for cultural adaptation shows that migrants go through fairly predictable phases—anticipation, cultural shock, and adjustment—in adapting to a new cultural situation. However, the duration of passing each stage and how to pass it can be different among groups. Based on these strong cultural differences between Afghanistan and Canada. The cultural adaptation of Afghan women in Canada requires a reconceptualization of values, including gender stereotypes. Gender theorists demonstrate that gender constructs and performances are constituted in concrete, historically changing, and unequal social relationships. There are reasons for resistance and tangible barriers to the redefinition of concepts and cultural adaptation of Afghan women in Canada, which can put these women in particularly difficult situations that they must navigate in their daily lives. Newly arrived Afghan women in Canada faced strong patriarchy and traditionalism in their cultural experience. These limitations and inequalities existed not only at home but also in the social organizations they faced (such as school, medical care, and so on). Patriarchy and traditionalism may have been institutionalized in their own beliefs, too. They may be surprised to find judgment from their female Canadian counterparts despite the clear gender disparities that still exist in Canada. All these conflicting experiences make the process of cultural adaptation difficult for them and intensify and extend the cultural shock. Therefore, this research seeks to know how these women navigate the differences between their past cultural context and the host environment in Canada. Based on a qualitative approach, I will conduct semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 60 Afghan women newcomers to Canada (who arrived after August 2021) in the four biggest Canadian cities (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and Calgary) to understand how newly-arrived Afghan immigrant and refugee women in Canada navigate their cultural adaptation to a completely different context. The findings of this research will show the position of their collectivist, patriarchal, traditionalist, and religious culture in the adaptation process to the individualist, diverse, secular, and modern host environment.

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.