(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

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.

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

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.

Preeti Dagar, University of Glasgow

Rethinking education and entrepreneurship for refugees: Interplay between policies and realities of five refugee groups

Developing countries in Global South host 83% of the world’s refugee populations (UNHCR, 2023 [1]) and are struggling to create education, livelihoods, and social inclusion opportunities for these marginalised groups (Bartlett and Ghaffar-Kucher, 2013 [2], Jacobsen and Fratzke, 2016 [3]). To sustain these refugees in their host countries, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and UNESCO promote skills and vocational training linked to self-employment and entrepreneurship, termed as refugee self-reliance. This paper combines capabilities and intersectional lenses to examine the effects of race, gender, class, ethnic, and religious identities of refugees on entrepreneurial skills development and utilisation. it provides policy implications for refugee education and entrepreneurship initiatives in protracted refugee situations. Finally, the study provides empirical evidence to support SDG [4] 4 and 8, particularly targets 4.3 and 8.3. These two targets promote equal and affordable access to education and encourage entrepreneurship. Drawing on qualitative research, semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and participatory drawing sessions were conducted with 66 respondents from Afghan, Rohingya, Somali, Chin, and Tibetan communities, and staff members from refugee organisations. The research examined skills and vocational education and livelihood opportunities available for refugees from five refugee groups in three cities of India: Delhi, Hyderabad, and Jaipur. The study was based on a qualitative research [5] design intending to capture refugee participants aspirations and expectations from the available skills training opportunities and avenues of utilising these learned skills to generate livelihoods. By bridging capabilities approach and intersectionality approaches, the paper draws attention to intertwined systems of power (education, skills, labour, and refugee policies), social structures (cultural norms and social hierarchies) and identities (gender, race, class, religion, nationality, and so on) of refugees that affect refugee skills utilisation for enterprise development, income generation, and well-being. Although all refugees are disadvantaged, some refugees, particularly refugee women, encounter more significant difficulties than others in attending training, generating livelihoods, and creating the lives that they desire. This study showcased refugee women had fewer resources, freedoms, and opportunities for skills enhancement and entrepreneurship engagement than refugee men. Refugee women, with their complex intersecting identities of race, religion, culture, ethnicity, religion, and nationality, find it hard to use their earned skills in the market to create entrepreneurship opportunities. By drawing attention to structural, legal, economic, and social factors, the paper deals with the freedom and agency of refugees in choosing what kind of education and work they want to be engaged in. By combining capabilities with intersectionality, the paper argues that the idea of entrepreneurship for refugees should seek to move beyond the neoliberal agenda of self-employment and self-reliance and towards well-being, social integration, and holistic development.