Category: Representation belonging futures

Obstacles and aspirations: stories from young refugees in the UK education system

Posted on by Emily

By Jáfia Naftali Câmara.

‘Refugee Stories: Education: Obstacles and Aspirations‘ draws on findings from my doctoral research project on young refugees’ educational experiences in the UK. The study investigated how young refugee people and their families have encountered the education system while considering the implications of living as refugees in England. Young refugee people’s right to education is enshrined in British law; however, the UK has no specific educational policy for them.

Invisibilizing practices add to the silence around their experiences and needs. ‘Refugee Stories’ tells young refugees’ and families’ stories to amplify their voices and shine a light on the social and material conditions they experience.

How ‘Refugee Stories’ was born

Cover of ‘Refugee Stories’ (illustration by ARC Studios in collaboration with participants and Jáfia Naftali Câmara)

I volunteered as an English as an Additional Language (EAL) tutor to young refugees at a secondary school in the South of England. I also volunteered at local organizations advocating for refugee people and fundraising to facilitate their access to phones and internet at home. Through volunteering, I built connections with three families who expressed interest in participating in my research. While most research tends to be school-based, I focused on working directly with families to understand how they encountered England’s education system. Particularly, I was interested in how policy meets lived experience. The mothers often asked me to help their children with their homework or to help them access technology to continue remote schooling. I maintained contact with families and provided support when they needed it throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns implemented in England.  

As part of my methodology, I enacted an ethics of care by trying to mitigate some of the challenges they endured. Refugee families, including asylum seekers, may have limited access to resources and technology at home. Therefore, remote schooling was very challenging for them because they did not have reliable access to computers, phones and internet, and they also struggled to pay for data for their cell phones. As part of my research and commitment to support them, I tried to highlight their hardships and amplify their voices, as in this article, I co-wrote with Maria, a mother seeking asylum who participated in the study.   

Creating ‘Refugee Stories’ with families to highlight their experiences and perspectives was essential to my methodology and ethics of care. My approach to critical ethnography was to go beyond simply observing and interviewing participants but also to try and address some of the hardships that families experienced. In addition to providing schoolwork and English language support, I facilitated one family’s access to a laptop and a phone, books and art supplies for all the young people, data for their phones and access to extra-curricular activities such as football lessons. I dedicated time weekly to helping one family use their new laptop and new software needed for their schooling, including MS Teams, sending emails, creating Word and PowerPoint files and attaching files to email messages. When their schooling shifted online, young people were expected to know how to do those tasks, but some had never done it before.  

Page from ‘Refugee Stories’ (illustrations by ARC Studio in collaboration with participants and Jáfia Naftali Câmara)

As a migrant from a working-class family from the so-called ‘global south’, I understood some of the challenges that the families lived through. We developed a connection of mutual care. The mothers often cooked meals and invited me to have lunch or dinner with them. One mother baked a cake for my birthday, and their children wrote me Christmas cards and ‘thank you’ notes. ‘Refugee Stories’ was part of my methodological approach to amplify young people’s and their families’ perspectives and experiences and communicate research findings beyond academia. It was an art-science collaboration to make research findings more accessible. For example, the young people chose their pseudonyms, the appearance of their characters and what they wanted to highlight to readers. ‘Refugee Stories’ was funded by the University of Bristol’s Temple Quarter Engagement Fund, allowing me to involve families in creating the zine and pay them an honorarium for their time. 

Using ‘Refugee Stories’ for teaching and learning  

I am interested in learning how educators and students may find the zine useful for their practices. I point to a few goals I have for how this zine may support learning in classrooms:  

I adopt anti-colonial and anti-racist perspectives. The zine prompts us to consider how education can acknowledge the UK, EU and US colonial histories and imperialism that permeates today, including the militarization of borders and the criminalization of migration. Colonial histories and imperial violence need to be acknowledged in education systems. 

The zine could lead to discussions on what causes people to leave their homes, migration histories, how refugees are created, and the challenges they experience trying to find safety. For example, Muhammad, a young Iraqi man portrayed in the zine, often talked about the history of Iraq and the US invasion of his country. Muhammad also highlighted that his history classes mainly studied Europe and World War II. While interesting, he wanted more history about the world, including Mesopotamia. Muhammad’s reflections indicate the need to challenge the Eurocentric nature of curricula in Western countries – what knowledge(s) and histories are erased? Whose voices are silenced?   

The zine can provide resources that connect to students’ realities. I learned from my research that curriculum content is often disconnected from young people’s realities. A young man from Eritrea in secondary school discussed that he had to annotate Shakespeare’s poems while learning to write for the first time in his third language, English. His teacher was aware that he struggled but was not aware why he faced difficulties to follow her instructions. She had no idea about his previous experiences, including that he had never been taught how to write. Resources like this one can offer mirrors of students’ own experiences, while offering windows for other students into refugee students’ lives.  

The zine can support educators in understanding the knowledge refugee students bring to the classroom. Schools may view refugee learners through a deficit-based lens and focus on what they ‘lack’: insufficient English language proficiency, no ‘formal education’, limited schooling or viewing learners through a lens of ‘trauma’. Young refugee learners bring essential knowledge(s) and different ways of knowing, being and doing. They may still be learning English but often speak or understand various languages. As demonstrated in ‘Refugee Stories’, young people are resourceful and active agents in creating their networks, helping their parents learn the language and their new country’s systems, and studying independently. England is very institutionally monolingual. Talking to the young people who participated in the study, I learned that some educators might have deficit-based views of families who speak their first language at home rather than English, thinking that the young people may struggle to learn English because they speak other languages at home. In this study, some young people were influenced by that and often stopped using some of their languages to prioritize speaking in English more often. ‘Refugee Stories’ could be used to discuss various themes such as language and multilingualism, migration and colonialism. 

I welcome your thoughts on these issues and how you may use ‘Refugee Stories’ for teaching and learning. 

READ THE COMIC HERE

Jáfia Naftali Câmara is a Brazilian scholar and Research Fellow at the Centre for Lebanese Studies, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. She received her PhD from the University of Bristol with a thesis on ‘Refugee Youth and Education: Aspirations and Obstacles in England’. She is currently undertaking a study on education in emergencies focusing on Brazil and other Latin American countries. 

This blogpost was originally published by the Harvard Graduate School of Education REACH programme (Research, education and action for refugees around the world) under the title ‘Refugee Stories: Education: Obstacles and Aspirations.’

Invisible: domestic workers’ commutes in Latin America

Posted on by Emily

By Valentina Montoya Robledo and Rachel Randall.

Read the Spanish version here.

Domestic workers make up one in every five working women in Latin America, totalling approximately 13 million individuals. In recent decades, a significant transformation has occurred as many domestic workers have shifted from living in their employers’ homes to commuting daily from their own residences due to rapid urbanization processes. Latin America became the most urbanized region in the world in 2014. By 2020, 83% of domestic workers in Colombia, for example, resided in their own homes. Their precarious earnings and the fact that more than 80% of them are informal workers, however, have forced them to live in city outskirts. Both their homes and the households where they work often lack proper connections to public transport as well as pavements for pedestrians, making their lengthy commutes both time consuming and expensive.

(Image: from Invisible)

This shift has led to extensive commuting times across Latin America, with domestic workers’ journeys reaching up to seven hours per day in Bogotá, six hours in Lima, five hours in São Paulo (Montoya Robledo, forthcoming) and three and a half hours in smaller Colombian cities like Manizales. According to Bogotá’s 2015 Mobility Survey, domestic workers have the longest commutes among all urban occupations in Colombia. In many countries they also allocate a significant portion of their income to cover transport costs: 36% in Lima, for example, and 28% in Medellín. During these prolonged journeys, domestic workers often face racial discrimination, gender-based violence, common crime and road safety concerns.

These hardships not only risk domestic workers’ safety but also hinder their access to a range of opportunities from education to leisure to political participation. And yet, local governments in Latin America frequently overlook their situation. The Invisible Commutes project was set up in 2019 to shed light on this critical issue, starting with a documentary about domestic workers’ concerns, which was expanded into a transmedia project in 2020. Collaborating with musician and cultural manager Andres Gonzalez and filmmaker Daniel Gomez, the project aims to raise awareness not only among scholars but also the general public and mobility experts about domestic workers’ limited Right to the City in Latin America.

Invisible Commutes uses various media to depict domestic workers’ expensive, violent and lengthy commutes in order to advocate for their Right to the City. The project includes short audio segments featuring their testimonials, which focus on their experiences when commuting and their perspectives on mobility infrastructure projects. It includes a section on the maps that domestic workers have drawn of their commutes. The project also produces opinion pieces and journal papers, and engages in academic, civil society and local government discussions. Recognized in 2023 as a ‘Remarkable Feminist Voice in Transport’ by Tumi and Women Mobilize Women, Invisible Commutes is a comprehensive effort to address transportation injustice for millions of women.

Filming for the Invisible Commutes documentary, Invisible, has taken place over an extended period, beginning in 2019 with a focus on Reinalda Chaverra, a domestic worker based in Medellín. In 2022 filming continued in Bogotá with domestic worker Belén García. In 2023, Invisible Commutes was awarded funds by Migration Mobilities Bristol to complete the documentary short and hold a workshop with the Afro-Colombian Union of Domestic Workers (UTRASD) in Medellín.

The workshop explored how domestic workers themselves want to see their commutes represented on screen and enabled their voices to feed into the form and content of the final documentary. This was crucial for us because, despite a recent upsurge in Latin American films that focus on domestic worker protagonists, almost none depict the workers’ lengthy and challenging commutes. It is widely acknowledged that these films tend to be made by directors whose perspectives are more closely aligned with those of employers, rather than employees. They often dramatize the dynamics of employer-employee relationships within employers’ homes by taking live-in domestic workers as their protagonists, as is the case, for example, of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018) and Anna Muylaert’s The Second Mother (2015). In reality, hourly paid roles are becoming more popular than live-in forms of domestic work, as this report focusing on Brazil also shows. When we talked about the lack of visual representations of domestic workers’ commutes at the workshop, one participant explained that it is not convenient for employers to acknowledge the long, challenging and costly journeys that their employees have to undertake because it raises the question of how these commutes should be compensated.

As a starting point for our discussion, we watched clips from the film Roma, which focuses on domestic worker Cleo. Set in the early 1970s in Mexico City, Cleo’s story is strongly inspired by the real experiences of Liboria Rodríguez who was employed by director Alfonso Cuarón’s family when he was a child. Although Roma risks reinforcing a narrative in which its protagonist is both celebrated as, and relegated to, the status of a surrogate member of her employer family, the way the film dwells on Cleo’s gruelling routine maintaining an extensive house and supporting her employers’ four children sparked strong affective responses among the workshop’s participants. Some addressed the negative implications this kind of workload has for managing to exercise or relax, while others reflected on the impact it has for workers’ relationships to their own loved ones, namely their children.

Many of the insights that fed into Invisible were, nonetheless, provoked by the participants’ reflections on the differences between their experiences commuting and those depicted in one of the only Latin American films that focuses on this topic. Rodrigo Moreno’s Réimon (2014) traces the lengthy journeys undertaken by its protagonist Ramona, an hourly-paid cleaner who commutes on public transport from her home on the outskirts of Buenos Aires to her employers’ upmarket apartments in its centre. Like Roma, Réimon also dwells on the details of Ramona’s work and routine. One workshop participant praised the grace and elegance that characterises Ramona’s portrayal: she is always nicely dressed and well presented. The importance of this became clear as multiple participants spoke about how the distance that they need to walk across difficult terrain to catch initial transport links means they are forced to arrive at work with unclean clothes, suffer rude comments from other commuters, or take a cloth with them to try and wipe off the dirt. The dignity of Ramona’s depiction resonated with UTRASD members who shared experiences of having been denigrated by others due to their occupation and discriminated against on the basis of their race.

One participant also noted that Ramona does not appear to feel afraid walking through the city in the dark of the early morning, while the participant herself has often feared being attacked. Ohers attested to how common it is to be sexually harassed or assaulted on public transport. Another participant observed that Ramona is shown getting a seat on the train, while the buses they catch are so full at peak times that they must always stand.  

In response to these challenges, Invisible concludes with the changes that UTRASD members themselves would make to improve domestic workers’ experiences commuting to their employers’ homes. These include: building more public bathrooms in stations and across the city; introducing women-only carriages; giving domestic workers preference in queues at peak times; and subsidising public transport for domestic workers or introducing forms of transport specifically for them. The final three proposals would likely require individuals to register formally as domestic workers, which would be a positive given the challenges that widespread informality brings across the sector.

We hope that the documentary encourages policy makers and urban planners to take up their proposals and continue hearing what they have to say.

Invisible (Valentina Montoya Robledo, Daniel Gómez Restrepo and Andres Gonzalez Robledo 2024) will have its UK premiere at the University of Bristol on 31 January 2024.

Valentina Montoya Robledo is a Senior Researcher in Gender and Mobility at the Transport Studies Unit (TSU) at the University of Oxford. She directs the transmedia project Invisible Commutes on domestic workers’ commuting experiences. Her most recent paper is ‘That is why users do not understand the maps we make for them’: Cartographic gaps between experts and domestic workers and the Right to the City.

Rachel Randall is Reader in Latin American Studies at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). Her book, Paid to Care: Domestic Workers in Contemporary Latin American Culture is published this month by the University of Texas Press. It explores the struggles of domestic workers in Latin America through an analysis of films, texts and digital media produced with them or inspired by their experiences. The book is available now with a 30% discount using the code UTXM30 by ordering online in the UK and Europe and in the US and Latin America. 

Further MMB blogposts about domestic workers in Latin America include Rachel’s post on ‘Domestic workers and COVID-19: Brazil’s legacy of slavery lives on,’ and ‘The dangers of staying home: lockdown deepens inequalities in Brazil,’ by Fernanda Mallak, Isabela Vianna Pinho and Thalles Vichiato Breda.

Looking for the ‘state’ in statelessness research

Posted on by Emily

By Natalie Brinham.

Eight months after Myanmar’s genocidal violence in 2017, which saw more than a million Rohingyas driven into Bangladesh, 55-year-old Rafique (not his real name) welcomed me into his shelter in a busy section of the refugee camp. He served me tea and asked me to wait – he wanted to show me something important that would explain ‘everything I wanted to know’ about Rohingya statelessness in Myanmar.

After some time, he emerged from behind the blanket that had been hung as a make-shift wall. He placed a metal cash box on the bamboo floor. Opening it with a key, he revealed a stack of papers, cards and photos – tattered ones, faded ones and plastic covered ones. Very carefully, he unfolded and displayed the contents across the length of the floor in front of me and my young Rohingya ‘fixer’. Methodically, he placed them in date order with the oldest closest to him. There were ID cards from his parents, grandparents, uncles, aunties and children – fraying blue and pink ones from the 1950s, white ones for the 1990s and one new turquoise one; registration documents listing every family member from the 1970s to the 2010s complete with crossings out, alterations and comments added by officials; joint-mugshots of the family holding a board with their registration number; repatriation documents from the 1970s and 1990s; and piles of land registration papers going back to the early years of independence in the 1950s.

‘But Uncle,’ said my fixer in amazement, ‘This must be one of the most complete collections in the whole camp! How on earth did you manage to keep hold of all these documents?’

Other Rohingya refugees had told us how their documents had been confiscated, seized, destroyed and burnt by state officials. Rafique explained how he would wrap the papers and cards in plastic, secure them in a metal box and bury them deep underground. Each year for almost 30 years, he would dig them up, rewrap them and bury them somewhere else. His brother was well connected; when authorities demanded he relinquish old ID cards, he would say they were lost and offered bribes of food, farm produce, favours or money.

The word ‘Rohingya’ is pointed out on a household registration list from Myanmar, saved in the camps of Bangladesh for proof of Rohingya identity (image: Natalie Brinham, 2019)

Pointing to the documents in turn, Rafique explained – over three hours – how successive regimes in Myanmar had slowly destroyed Rohingya identity as a group belonging to the Rakhine region of the country. He kept the papers, he said, to evidence Rohingya history in Myanmar. He re-told the stories of belonging of his relatives; three mass expulsions and forced repatriations since independence; slow denationalisation; violent encounters with state authorities. Finally, he talked about his determination to resist the current state ID scheme, which ‘makes Rohingya into foreigners’. Group resistance, he reasoned, was intricately connected to the mass violence, killings and expulsions that had landed him in this refugee camp in 2017. Myanmar, he said, would not be a safe place to return to until Rohingyas were ‘given back’ their citizenship.

Invisible people or invisible states?

At a global level, citizenship has been compared to a giant filing system. Each individual human is assigned at least one nationality and filed ‘according to their return address’ or where they can be deported to. From a statist point of view, stateless people – or people without any legal citizenship – are an aberration in that filing system. They have no return address, so cannot be formally deported or expelled.

Human rights advocates take a different view. Those un-filed people are an ‘anomaly’ in an international rights system that is supposed to apply universally to all humans. It’s impossible for people to realise their rights if no state is responsible for protecting or providing for them. As such, stateless people are often described as legally and administratively ‘invisible’. They struggle to access legal protections, education, healthcare, work and financial services. Further, they are unable to benefit from international development and aid interventions.

Though statist concerns over deportability and human rights concerns over rightlessness seem to be ideologically opposed to one another, proposed solutions to the problems of statelessness often align. Administrative invisibility is generally tackled by proposing more state registration, more documentation, more efficiency, more digitisation and more biometrics. Sustainable Development Goal 16.9, which commits to providing a ‘legal identity for all’ by 2030, has become a rallying cry for international development organisations, refugee and migration management agencies, multinational tech companies and NGOs alike.

Yet, these approaches to statelessness by-pass fundamental issues relating to state abuses of power. State authorities consolidate their power through identification technologies and ID schemes, and can misuse these powers to exclude and expel. Few people in the world are actually completely undocumented. More people lack the right documents to be able to live legally in their homes, move freely within their own country, find regulated work or use banking systems. Other people are wrongly documented/registered by state authorities as foreign. The wrong kinds of registration can make things worse.

Despite being hailed as the harbingers of social inclusion, digital ID schemes can harden the boundaries of citizenship, excluding minorities and making it more difficult for people of uncertain citizenship to function in society. As Rafique’s account shows, the implementation of ID systems can be intricately linked to citizenship stripping and mass atrocities. Analysis of how power functions (differently) in particular states and societies, and how it functions through citizenship regimes and ID systems, is absent in ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches to delivering ‘legal identities for all’. ID schemes are often misconceived as neutral processes in which sets of biological and/or biographical facts about individuals are recorded. In fact, they are imbued with power and profoundly impact social relations.

In initiatives to lift ‘stateless people’ out of a state of invisibility – to count them and document them – we fail to look properly at the perpetrating states. States are not identical containers that will function once filled up with international policy recommendations, capacity development and technical advice. Rafique’s oral history, which covered a period of 30 years of UN presence in his homelands, tells a story not of the invisibility of stateless Rohingya, but of how international actors have failed to look at the criminal intent of the state relating to their ID schemes and registration processes.

Statelessness studies often grapple with how to research ‘invisible’ populations. It’s equally important to grapple with how and why state violence has been invisibilised in anti-statelessness work. The very best starting point is to listen properly to survivors of state violence. Rafique’s account is just one of many. Rohingyas and many other stateless people are not really ‘invisible’. It’s just that if we look for them through state-tinted lenses, we tend to look right through the structures that were built to incarcerate them.

Natalie Brinham is an ESRC Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Bristol, working with MMB and the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies. Her research project is titled ‘IDs for Rohingyas: Pathways to Citizenship or Instruments of Genocide?’ She was previously a Senior Programme Lead at the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion.

From Bristol to Brasilia: collaborating on migration and mobilities research

Posted on by Emily

By Anamaria Fonsêca.

In April this year I visited the University of Brasilia (UnB), Brazil, with Professor Foluke Adebisi from the Bristol Law School to take part in a series of lectures organised by the postgraduate programmes in Law and in Human Rights. I have been collaborating with UnB’s Research Group on International Private Law, International Trade and Human Rights since the outbreak of the pandemic to develop research that builds bridges between Brazil and the UK. The invitation to visit UnB this year was an opportunity to advance this work and the internationalisation of both UnB’s and the University of Bristol’s research.

UnB is among the top five universities in Brazil, excelling in terms of internationalisation, affirmative action programmes, research quality and teaching standards. Our visit specifically aimed to establish a dialogue between the Bristol Law School (through Foluke) and MMB (through me) and the Law School of UnB and their internationalisation department. Foluke brilliantly lectured and established dialogues on law, legal education and decolonisation, while I was responsible for diffusing preliminary results from my doctoral research, specifically on the topic of ‘Creating Immigration Hostile Environments: A Case Study from England’. The aim was to draw parallels between the legal and public policy frameworks of countries in the global north, such as the UK, and countries in South America, such as Brazil, which has had its refugee reception policies significantly affected by the change of government in recent years. The aim was to think about how political ideologies through political parties interfere in the establishment of mechanisms for the implementation and promotion of human rights, in this case specifically for asylum seekers and refugees.

University of Brasilia (image: Ray Fernandes)

Addressing the creation of hostile environments for migrants is impossible without raising three key issues: the concept of national sovereignty; the Western geopolitical perspective on human rights; and xenophobia and racism rooted in a superficial lack of identification with the ‘other’, whether due to physical characteristics or their social, economic and political contexts.

Many cases of migration are a post-colonial phenomenon, which continues to link the colonising nations and those previously colonised. The presence in the UK, for example, of people whose origins are not far removed from Africa, Asia or Latin America reflects the ties created by the British empire. With this in mind, I began my presentation with a case study of England, the first country to talk openly about the creation of a hostile environment for migrants after Theresa May, then-Home Secretary, coined the term during a period of heated debate about migration in the UK.

At UnB we were welcomed by Professor Inez Lopes Matos, coordinator of the Research Group on International Private Law, International Trade and Human Rights. Professor Loussia Felix and Professor Menelick de Carvalho Netto also took part in the panels involving the decolonisation of legal education and the decolonial approach to the category of asylum seekers and refugees. This deepened and refined discussions and demonstrated how much the approach of MMB can be strengthened through partnerships with UnB and vice versa. Students from the postgraduate courses in Law and Human Rights expressed great interest in establishing more knowledge exchange with professors, researchers and students linked to MMB in order to broaden their Lusophone approach to key themes of interest of the research group. These themes include:

1. Political violence and post-conflict reconstruction in communities experiencing local, national and cross-border displacement. In Brazil, the growing community of Venezuelan migrants and refugees is a focus point for research. Students’ discussions provided an account of Operação Acolhida (Operation Welcome), a government mission responsible for welcoming and integrating migrants and refugees from Venezuela, and the political effects that such an operation has in terms of a regional responsibility for human rights, given Venezuela’s suspension from Mercosur since 2017.

2. Labour and mobility and the historical legacy of slavery in contemporary work relations. The students’ research interests are also focused on historical reparations for black and indigenous people in the process of construction of Brazil as a sovereign nation, its direct link with the trafficking of people from West Africa and the consequences of a late abolition of slavery. Their other studies look at types of labour analogous to slavery, which in Brazil ranges from unpaid domestic and social reproduction work to land exploitation.

3. Representations of territorial boundaries and the tensions between political and ecological rights. The research group is also interested in the plight of indigenous communities, specifically during the Bolsonaro administration when more land was expropriated, and the Amazon’s natural heritage was further destroyed. While we were in Brasilia there were protests against the Marco Temporal (Time Limit Trick), which recently came to a vote in the Supreme Court and was not approved – a victory for indigenous peoples for the time being.

4. Neoliberal market expansion, wildcat economics and the movement of people and capital to and from the global margins. The Brazilian and South American experience of late capitalism is another theme within the research group, in particular the consequences of colonisation on the country’s political, economic, social and cultural structures.

5. The circulation of ideas and translational exchanges across borders within Latin America and beyond. Brazil’s ‘distance’ from other Latin American nations in terms of identity and culture is also a key theme, again taking into account the legacy of colonisation. This includes the experience of joining forces with other Latinx, and more particularly South American, countries through international agreements, which have encouraged the integration and recognition of Brazilians as Latinxs, and the repercussions that these socio-political aspects have on the country’s development.

Our conversations with the UnB students and staff around these themes were enriching and productive, and highlighted the many ideas to be developed, lessons to be learned and collaborations to be established between the two universities, particularly through their role in developing their countries’ intellectual and political spheres. We look forward to this collaboration bearing fruit for both academic environments.

Anamaria Fonsêca is a Teaching Associate in the Law School at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on forced migration, ethnicity, integration, citizenship and the hostile environment for immigrants, as well as sex work and women’s rights. She studied for her PhD at the University of Bristol and recently submitted her thesis on ‘England’s hostile environment: sex work as an attempt to mitigate the impacts of destitution for women who are denied asylum.’ She is also a qualified lawyer and a member of the Brazilian Bar Association. Anamaria’s visit to the University of Brasilia was supported by MMB.

Expatriate: why we need to study migration categories

Posted on by Emily

New writing on migration and mobilities – an MMB special series

By Sarah Kunz.

My new book Expatriate: Following a Migration Category explores the postcolonial history and politics of the category expatriate. It asks what expatriate has been taken to mean in different places and times. How has it been employed and shaped by political and economic projects? Specifically, how has the expatriate been entangled in the mid-century political decolonisation of European colonial empires and the concomitant rise of the USA and the Soviet Union as new world powers? The book looks at what the changing category reveals about how multinational corporations have exerted and defended their power across such geopolitical ruptures, and how they have participated in building a racialised and gendered global economy. It explores how the expatriate has reflected and reproduced social inequality in migration and mobility, not least in access to mobility and its assigned value. Finally, it asks what insights might the history and present of the category expatriate hold for our understanding of the ongoing coloniality of migration and its study?

Expatriate engages such questions as it follows the category through three sites of its articulation. In each of these it explores the situated histories of the category’s making and contestation, and its remaking and lived experience. From these three sites the book also thinks about the politics of migration more broadly.

Choosing sites was not easy – the category expatriate has numerous sites of articulation. This book first follows it to Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. Nairobi is the perfect place to study expats, I was told repeatedly and with emphasis during my research. Nairobi is a young city and from its inception has been a transnational city, a city of migrants. Its creation as an imperial centre and its ongoing role as an economic and political hub have thus been bound up with migrations ranging from the highly privileged to those experiencing various forms of oppression and exploitation. As I learned, the category expatriate has been a central feature of these migration regimes and thus participated in the making of urban space and, indeed, the nation.

The second site I visited was the Expatriate Archive Centre (EAC) in The Hague, an archive dedicated to documenting worldwide expatriate social history. The archive grew out of a project by ‘Shell wives’ to document their lives on the move with Royal Dutch Shell, one of the 20th century’s most powerful multinational corporations. At the EAC I learned about how the expatriate is effective today as a category that helps us make sense of migration histories. I also learned how a foremost multinational corporation has (re)created the racialised and gendered management of its business empire throughout the 20th century through the skilful deployment and interpretation of migration.

The third site of this study is the academic field of international human resource management (IHRM) literature. Recognising knowledge production as a social practice situated within specific socio-political contexts allows studying it as an archive of these social contexts. Approaching IHRM literature as such meant reading it against but also along its grain to reveal the political nature of ostensibly technical writings on labour rotation in multinational corporations. Academic writing emerged as involved in the hierarchical ordering of human movement and labour not least by systematically erasing political conflict and struggle from its accounts and replacing it with cultural explanations. 

The book works on the epistemological premise that as categories travel and change, their journeys offer useful analytical gateways to examine broader social changes and shifting power geometries. If migration categories are socially produced, then examining their production is a fruitful research strategy to explore not only the category itself but also the social processes that produced it. Thus, following the expatri­ate allows investigating both the category and its role in the postcolonial politics of migration and mobility.

Following a category means following the term spatially and historically, textually and in everyday lived experience. It also means following up on its uses and effects and thinking about what might follow: how to move beyond difficult categories and articulate a more just politics of migration.

The book shows the expatriate to be a malleable and mobile category of shifting meaning and changing membership; a contested category, as passionately embraced by some as it is rejected by others; and a sometimes surprising category, doing unexpected work with undetermined outcomes. Yet, throughout its conceptual meanderings and the disputes over its meaning, the expatriate proves consistently central to struggles over inequality, power and social justice.

I found that categories like expatriate, and migrant, are central to the gendered and racialised politics of mobility precisely because of their useful conceptual multiplicity and malleability. However, this also means that the relationship of the category expatriate to racial and gender categories is not given, never automatic and rarely straightforward. Tracing this always shifting and contested relationship is exactly the analytical task.

The expatriate has much to teach us about the category migrant, too. Migration is today often equated with the South-North movement of the global poor, and the contemporary migrant habitually positioned as vulnerable and exploited. Many people, of course, do move from the souths of this world to its norths. Many of them struggle, experience violence and exploitation. Yet, if these dimensions come to define the condition of the migrant as such we are creating a homogenised and essentialised figure that risks mystifying socially constituted experiences with specific histories. That which becomes seen as a normal, even natural, part of being a migrant too easily goes unquestioned, even becomes unquestionable. The matter in need of explaining becomes the supposed explanation. Ultimately, this not only limits our understanding of how social inequality is produced, but also limits our ability to imagine and realise a more socially just future.

Further, the migrant as already poor and exploited renders invisible those migrants that in no way struggle but benefit from and advance contemporary power formations, also through their migrations. Imperial state and corporate projects always rely on the migration of their most privileged avatars – and they rely on the framing of these mobilities as altogether different than the mobilities of those who are being scapegoated and criminalised. In this sense, migration categories are core to today’s cognitive legitimisation of an unequally bordered world.

The book thus joins calls for re-orienting our analytical habits from employing categories like expatriate and migrant towards studying them. Attending to categories’ multiply inflected uses and ambiguities, even in scholarship, is instructive. Doing so does not mean determining whether expatriates are migrants and which type thereof, but asking how, in particular instances, they are positioned as different or the same and with what effects and what this allows us (not) to see. In other words, the question becomes what the stakes are of arguments about expatriates (not) being migrants or being a particular type thereof.


Sarah Kunz is a Lecturer at the Department of Sociology, University of Essex, and an Honorary Researcher with MMB. Before joining the University of Essex this year she was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Sarah’s research explores privileged migration, the postcolonial politics of migration categories and knowledge production on migration, the historical relationship between mobility and racism, corporate managerial migration, and the commodification of citizenship. Her new book, Expatriate: Following a Migration Category (2023), is published by Manchester University Press.

See also Sarah’s previous MMB blogpost, ‘From imperial sugar to golden passports: the Citizenship Industry’, which explores the rise of ‘investment migration’.

Roots and routes: debating indigenous rights in twentieth-century Latin America

Posted on by Emily

New writing on migration and mobilities – an MMB special series

By Jo Crow.

My recent book Itinerant Ideas (2022) explores the multiple meanings and languages of indigeneity (Merlan, 2009) circulating across borders in early twentieth-century Latin America. It takes readers through an extensive visual and written representational repertoire to show how ideas about indigenous peoples evolved as they moved between nations during this period. These representations include newspaper articles lamenting indigenous people’s supposed culture of backwardness, ignorance and poverty, public speeches making indigeneity synonymous with colonial exploitation and subjugation, and reprinted paintings depicting indigenous people as suppliant victims. By contrast, I also reflect on conference proceedings that cast ‘the Indian’ as the epitome of hard work and resilience in the modern world, magazine covers celebrating indigenous cultural creativity and entrepreneurship, teaching materials asserting indigenous society’s intimate and superior knowledge of the land, and poems making indigeneity symbolic of (anti-colonial, anti-capitalist) resistance and rebellion. (See examples of archival documents explored in Itinerant Ideas in the images below).

Paper by Manuel Calle Escajadillo presented at the First Inter-American Indigenista Congress, Mexico, 1940 (image: author’s own)
Chile: A Monthly Survey of Chilean Affairs, Vol. 11 no. 9, 1926, New York (image: author’s own)

Building on the work of James Clifford (1997), my book argues that such diverse, contesting meanings and languages can, to some extent, be joined up with either a story of ‘roots’ (the static, ‘local’ Indian, fixed in the rural community, working the land according to traditional custom, antagonistic to the existence of the modern state) or ‘routes’ (the changing, strategising, productive Indian moving in various circuits, central to the success of the modern state).

Photograph of Julio Tello displayed at the Pachacamac Museum, Peru (image: author’s own)

Sometimes the indigenous protagonists of Itinerant Ideas come to represent both stories at the same time. This is the case of Quechua-speaking Peruvian archaeologist Julio Tello (1880-1947) who, before becoming famous in national scientific circles, studied at Harvard and travelled to many European cities, including London, where he attended the International Congress of Americanists and met his soon-to-be English wife. Tello used his national and international platform to celebrate the ‘deeply rooted genealogical tree’ to which he belonged. Such profound roots, he said, ‘extracted from this land the sap which nourished a race of giants’ (speech published in El Comercio, Lima, 14 December 1924).

Ideas about indigenous identity and history matter because they inform state legislation (related to land ownership, for example, or education or health) which impacts indigenous lives. And individuals matter because they develop and disseminate ideas and create state policy. They are bound by state and bigger socioeconomic structures but they are also part of these structures and thereby influence them.

Writing on indigenous conflict in Bolivia, Andrew Canessa (2018) makes the obvious but important point that ‘“indigenous” is not an indigenous concept’ (p.11). While many of the most prominent intellectuals and political activists under scrutiny in Itinerant Ideas were not indigenous themselves a key aim of the book is to emphasise indigenous interventions in debates about indigenous identity and history, showing the many different ways in which they both perpetuated dominant discourses of race and fundamentally undermined and challenged them.             

The book also draws attention to the transnational dimension of conversations about indigeneity. In contrast to much of the historiography on race in Latin America, including my own earlier work (Crow 2013), Itinerant Ideas goes beyond the national confines of debates about indigenous rights. This does not mean it is written without nations in mind but rather that it ‘simultaneously pays attention to what lives against, between and through them’ (Saunier, 2013). Transnational debates help us to make better sense of national developments because they feed into and are in turn shaped by them.

The debates analysed in Itinerant Ideas take place through a vast web of transnational intellectual networks. This web is what makes an idea catch on and spread. Individuals invent ideas, which evolve as they are passed on through their networks. The book is therefore as much about relationships as it is about individuals. As Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler have commented in Connected (2011, p.xi), the ‘key to understanding people is understanding the ties between them’.

The book foregrounds indigenous voices within this web. A growing body of literature explores how indigenous social movements in Latin America today are linked into transnational networks. Excellent works also exist on indigenous border-crossing during the colonial era. Much less attention has been paid to the period in between. Itinerant Ideas demonstrates that transnational indigenous organising was a visible and audible reality in the early twentieth century, and that it took many different forms including labour protest, conference attendance, teacher exchanges, missionary activity, art exhibitions and theatre groups.

In order to anchor this investigation of transnational networks, my book looks at one particular cross-border relationship: that of Chile and Peru. The front cover shows a photograph of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile – territory that was Peruvian before Chile annexed it during the War of the Pacific (1879-1883).

Most scholarship on Chile and Peru concentrates on the history of this military conflict and its legacies. This means that relations between the two countries are interpreted almost exclusively as antagonistic and hostile. Itinerant Ideas does not deny the history of conflict but insists that there is another history that is worth researching and telling too – a history of collaboration and dialogue.

As well as Chile and Peru being read as countries always at war with each other, they are also read as oppositional nation-imagining projects. We see, for instance, how Chile has often been depicted as ‘more European’ or ‘less indigenous’ than Peru. The image on the front cover of Itinerant Ideas – an Inca road running through the Atacama Desert – suggests the possibility of a different narrative. It points to a history that brings Chile and Peru together rather than driving them apart. Many of the intellectuals in the book spoke of or wrote an Inca history that covered both these countries. For them, the so-called ‘indigenous question’ of the early twentieth century was something that crossed contemporary borders and moved between Chile and Peru as well as other Latin American countries.

All ideas are always, continuously itinerant. This is born out both in the histories told in Itinerant Ideas and in the travels that the book itself has been on since publication. Due to generous invitations from colleagues in Berlin, Dallas, Oxford, Santiago and Temuco, I have been able to talk about Itinerant Ideas with many different audiences. Our discussions sometimes took us back to key conversations, moments or people in the book. More often than not, though, they took us in new directions, opening up questions – for example, about the global south framework, Latin America’s relationship with the Caribbean, and the global production of indigeneity today – that I am now keen to explore further.

Jo Crow is Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Bristol and, from January 2024, will be MMB’s Research Development Associate Director. Her research interests include Chilean cultural history, nationalism and nation building, Mapuche cultural and political activism, and the production and circulation of ideas about race in Latin America. Her recent book, Itinerant Ideas (2022), is published by Palgrave Macmillan, with a 20% discount available here.

For more writing on movement and mobilities in Latin America visit our MMB Latin America blog. Posts on Chile include ‘The limits of interculturality: migration and cultural challenges in Chile‘ by Simón Palominos, ‘Mobility and identity in the Patagonian Archipelago‘ by Paul Merchant and ‘Migration, racism and the pandemic in Chile’s mass media‘ by Carolina Ramírez.

Notes from a visit to Calais

Posted on by Emily

Borderland Infrastructures – an MMB special series exploring the material and symbolic infrastructure of border regimes in the port cities of Calais and Dover.

By Nariman Massoumi.

Nariman Massoumi is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at the Department of Film and Television, University of Bristol, and Co-ordinator of the MMB Research Challenge Representation, Belonging, Futures. His filmmaking practice and research centres on histories of colonialism and migration.

Previous blogpost in our series on border regimes in Calais: ‘Breaching two worlds: seeing through borders in Calais‘ by Bridget Anderson.

‘I’ll see you on the other side’: migrant journeys and the (re)formation of diasporic identities

Posted on by Emily

By Leah Simmons Wood.

The poetry of Warsan Shire – a Kenya born, UK raised and US based second generation migrant of Somali origin – addresses the topic of journeys. She often deliberately fails to clarify the point of departure and of arrival. In this way, she centres journeys at the heart of the migration experience and removes the focus from nation states, whilst also using a local, singular perspective to draw attention to global movements of people.

Between departure and destination

‘No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. I’ve been carrying the old anthem in my mouth for so long that there’s no space for another song, another tongue or another language.’

Warsan Shire, ‘Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)’

Shire’s work highlights the instrumental role played by journeys in the formation of ‘hybrid’ identities – the condition of ‘double consciousness’ that develops in the liminal space between departure and destination. Journeys appear as formative, contrasting the common perspective in policy, media and academia that focuses on the causes and outcomes of migration and construct journeys as linear and as an in-between phase. Focusing on journeys thus gives voice and agency to migrants and legitimises their experiences of mobility and lives in exile.

(Image by yucar studios on Unsplash)

In ‘Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)’, her most famous poem, Shire recounts the reasons for leaving, the journey itself and the discrimination and state of precarity encountered within the host nation, supporting the notion of internal borders. These include the structural and racist complications migrants encounter once they reach their ‘final’ destination, aligning with ideas of migrants as non-belonging and undeserving. Changing laws and regulations mean the threat of deportation is constant, and migrants remain stuck in both/either mobility and/or immobility: this is the condition of exile. The impact on the speaker’s identity is found in her rhetorical question – ‘Can’t you see it on my body?’

Theoretical context and symbolism

Oceanic imagery and the female body are used as symbols in the poem to explore themes of journeys and identity (re)formation, and the connection between them. The sea appears as simultaneously deathly and generative, hopeful. This recalls previous academic work by Paul Gilroy and his concept of the ‘Black Atlantic’ (1993). It explains the emergence of transnational and intercultural voices through experiences of the diaspora and documents the cultural dialogue that occurred between Africa, North America and the UK. I apply this concept beyond the realms of the Atlantic to a different seascape: today, the Mediterranean hosts a liquid graveyard of migrants attempting to reach Europe – echoing the horrors of the Middle Passage. Despite this, Shire states that the journey and borders encountered are:

‘better than the scent of a woman completely on fire, or a truckload of men who look like my father, pulling out my teeth and nails, or fourteen men between my legs, or a gun, or a promise, or a lie, or his name, or his manhood in my mouth.’

Warsan Shire, ‘Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)’

Here, the female body imagery situates the speaker’s identity within the context of the journey. It illustrates how a person’s sense of self, gender and relationships are renegotiated and transformed by the process of migration. This is also clear in the language and long sentences, which reflect the linguistic work of the 1970’s French feminists’ in ‘l’ecriture feminine’. They argued that the ‘female imaginary’ exists as plurality, non-linearity and fluidity of identity, as reflected in art, poetry and language and symbols such as the ocean. The sea appears as a female space, offering an opportunity for analysing female creativity and resistance in language, where women can challenge their identities and the gendered roles assigned and defined by Western imperialism and patriarchal norms.

Poetry: lens of analysis

Poetry constitutes an especially useful lens of analysis in this regard. It serves as a vehicle for self-expression, the reclaiming of personal and political agency, community building and solidarity. It is specifically relevant to Shire as sound and listening are integral to Islamic culture, and more specifically as Somalia is known as a ‘nation of poets‘. Combining the predominantly pastoralist nomadic existence of Somalis with the fact that their written orthography was only realised in 1972, oral poetry acts as a signature of Somali culture and as a mode of communication across distances. By writing poetry, Shire reclaims her Somali heritage and identity whilst living in a Western world.

Voice, sound and listening

Internationally, migrants and stateless/racialised people are largely excluded by a focus on nation states and their citizens, where overlapping layers of oppression render them voiceless – without access to platforms for expressing their experiences and concerns. Sound has the potential to cross and dismantle borders through space and time, where the mobility of people is increasingly blocked by security controls and xenophobic policies. It emerges as a form of resistance with the ability to restore voice to those who feel like they have lost it. Indeed, Somalis use technological mediums, including social media, YouTube and cassette tapes, to disseminate their poetry and communicate across the diaspora. These mediums capture the emotions, accents, repetitions and hesitations that are often lost in other means of research, but that are given value in poetry and music. Whilst sound appears as something constructed and orderly, noise – embodied by these accents, repetitions and hesitations – holds negative connotations of being disruptive and pointless. In this way, sounds and noises reveal important information on migrant identities and are central to narratives of inclusion and exclusion.

The movement of the ocean

‘I’ll see you on the other side,’ Shire concludes – reflecting on the circular nature of migration. The title of the poem, ‘Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)’, suggests that at this point, she is being sent back to where she came from, back to where she started – mirroring the movement of the ocean. Placing journeys in this way at the core of attempts to understand migration would legitimise migrant experiences and give a more complete view of the formation of transnational identities and diasporas. The implications of this lie with the contestation and destabilisation of notions of nationalism, race and ethnicity that currently depict a static conception of nations and of societies. Such work would promote and legitimise migrant voices and acknowledge their experiences, with the objective of developing more inclusive politics and policies.

Leah Simmons Wood studied the MA in Migration and Mobility Studies at the University of Bristol and is an MMB Alumni Ambassador. She currently works as the Fundraising and Communications Officer for the Kenyan NGO Sponsored Arts for Education and for the UK Community Interest Company The Launchpad Collective.

This post was originally published by EURAC research in June 2022.

The other side of Partition: tracing Bengal and Bangladesh’s (post-)Partition legacy

Posted on by Emily

By Nazia Hussein and Anushka Chaudhuri.

Since its June 2022 release the Disney Plus series Ms Marvel has brought the conversation around the creation of Independent India and Pakistan – commonly dubbed as ‘Partition’ – to the mainstream. The series has been applauded for introducing the first Muslim superheroine and narratives of the Partition – one of the bloodiest episodes in South Asian history – onto global screens, with recognition of the British colonial administration’s active role in its formal withdrawal from, and cleaving of, British India. However, in line with much academic research and popular culture, Ms Marvel presents a partial Partition narrative via the Two Nation Theory. This theory positions Islam (Pakistan) and Hinduism (India) against each other and disregards the violent and multiple partitions of Bengal, which created West Bengal in eastern India and East Bengal in East Pakistan, the latter gaining liberation as Bangladesh in 1971. This positioning is aligned with most popular representations of South Asia and, as a result, erases past and present lived experiences of Bengali Muslims and Bangladeshis.

Created primarily for young and Western audiences, Ms Marvel erases the brutal realities of Partition. The Partition subplot demystifies the story of Aisha, the protagonist Kamaala’s maternal great-grandmother, who secured her family’s safety by ensuring they boarded ‘the last train to Pakistan’ from Punjab, India, to Punjab, Pakistan. The series’ representation of Partition as a time of tension, fear and existential insecurity, but otherwise a relatively organised migration process, amounts to misinformation for global audiences. What ensued after the announcement of the new borders – severing Punjab and Bengal – to create West Pakistan (now Pakistan), India and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) on 14th and 15th August 1947 was overwhelming disarray and disorder. Hindus and Sikhs were to migrate from West and East Pakistan into India, and Muslims were to migrate from India into one of Pakistan’s domains. Violence was widespread. Hence, the minor reference to boarding ‘the last train to Pakistan’ risks erasing the harsh truth that, due to widespread violence, train travel was often inaccessible. The limited number of trains that did run often arrived blood-stained or filled with dead bodies and became known as ‘blood’ or ‘ghost’ trains. Therefore, most individuals migrated on foot or by cattle, with many seeking refuge in camps, being killed or dying from disease.

Partition of India 1947 (image: Wikimedia Commons)

Many of the academic and popular representations of Partition are heavily Punjab-centric. Ms Marvel follows the same pattern. Its representation not only neglects Bengal’s Partition story but also latently equates the Punjab province with all of Pakistan by symbolically and linguistically portraying, but not directly naming, Punjabi language, culture and lands when representing Pakistani national identity and diasporas. That Bengal was partitioned twice – first in 1905, which, prompted by protests, was annulled in 1911, and then again in 1947 – is disregarded. Such erasures are dangerous, excluding voices from the ‘other half of Partition’ with its differing socio-political histories and ambivalent religious demographics. It also positions a Punjabi Partition narrative in popular culture as representative of this period, when there are other equally complex and alternative histories. For example, upper caste Bengali Hindus (including Zamindars or landowners) dominated political, arts and agrarian labour systems, subordinating Bengali Muslims and other lower caste workers and prohibiting their access to wealth and land. Coupled with Bengal’s Muslims being the marginal majority, this created a more complex task for the British and Indian political elite when drafting religionised borders.

While the shift of nationalism to communalism in Bengal is blamed for Partition, such narratives erase the agency of contemporary Bangladeshis’ and then-East Pakistani populations’ (denied) choice in their fate. This is observed in the political elite District Congress Committee in Sylhet’s pledge to Mahatma Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement – a Hindu contextualised Indian anti-colonialism movement which emphasised non-violence – despite the Committee’s lack of commitment to this type of struggle. Furthermore, after Hindu Zamindars learned of Sylhet’s lucrative tea estates and the international demand for tea, Muslim-majority Sylhet was fragmented during its 1947 referendum, with some regions being succeeded to greater Assam in India, despite voting patterns revealing an intention for Sylhet to join then-East Pakistan. The agency of East Bengal as a region and a people during Partition in seeking to choose their own destiny – despite being disallowed – is rarely addressed in either academia or popular culture, with Muslims in pre- and post-Partition India continuing to be presented as violent, communalistic and unpatriotic in curricular textbooks and films such as The Viceroy’s House and Earth. The creation of West and East Pakistan itself drew another line between the two regions and populations. This new ‘border’ induced linguistic, cultural and economic oppression, including genocide and weaponised rape, on the Bengalis of East Pakistan. This led to the Liberation War of 1971 when East Bengal again separated from Pakistan, gaining independence as Bangladesh.

The downplaying of the historical struggles of Bengal and contemporary Bangladesh undermines the legacy of discrimination and deprivation experienced by Bengali Muslims and Bangladeshis in the hands of the British colonists, Hindu nationalism and dominance in India, and West Pakistani state and military. This same deprivation is visible in the UK today. British Bangladeshis show the highest rates of poverty and face the largest ethnic pay gap with, on average, 20% less earnings than their white British counterparts. Indians are just 2.42%, Pakistanis 2.58% but Bangladeshis 3.56% more likely to be economically inactive than white ethnic groups in the UK. Further, the death rate involving COVID-19 was highest for Bangladeshis – respectively 5.0 and 4.5 times greater than white British male and female groups in 2020–2021.

In Britain’s classed and racialised surveillance state, Bangladeshis will continue to be labelled and penalised as ‘bad minorities’, likely to experience the worst of the Conservative’s austerity measures, particularly during the worsening cost of living crisis. Such lived experiences of British Bangladeshis reflect a long history of violence, starting with British and European colonialism.

Nazia Hussein is a Senior Lecturer in Race at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Her research, teaching and activism focuses on gender, race and religion with a particular focus on Asian Muslim women in South Asia and Britain. Her most recent book is Muslim New Womanhood in Bangladesh (Routledge, 2022).

Anushka Chaudhuri is a Sociology PhD student at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Her work explores nationalism, migration, ethnicity and racism, and focuses on South Asian histories, politics and diasporas.

What fosters a sense of belonging? Refugee voices in Germany

Posted on by Emily

By Emily LeRoux-Rutledge.

My children are new in Germany like those two flowers. I want my children to be allowed to stay in Germany…. We build something up. We are like LEGO, block by block.

‘A new life’ (image by Liam)
‘Building a life in Germany with our family’ (image by Liam)

These photographs and words belong to Liam* — a young man who made his way to Germany in the midst of the so-called European refugee crisis in 2015. They convey his determination to begin anew. Yet voices like Liam’s were scarcely heard during the crisis, subsumed by the voices of those already living in European host societies and their concerns about ‘integration’, which culminated in the 2016 German Integration Act.

In 2017, cognisant of this imbalance, Carmen Lienen and I undertook a photovoice project with refugees and asylum seekers in Germany, who had entered the country since the start of the crisis. We wanted to understand how they felt about the country (in contrast to how the country felt about them) and what would help to foster a sense of belonging. Our results were recently published in the Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies.

Much of what we learned aligns with the prevailing literature on immigrant identity, which suggests that newcomers undergo a complex process of identity negotiation as they endeavour to balance their pre-existing identities with those that align with their host societies. Often they do this aware of negative social representations about them, from which they seek to distance themselves. Additionally, they do this in the context of temporal uncertainty brought about by government policies, which require them to wait for approval to remain, to work and to reside permanently.

There was one thing that surprised us, however. Imagine, for a moment, you were to speak with two different groups of people: one made up of refugees with permission to remain in Germany, and the other made up of asylum seekers with no permission to remain. Which group do you think would feel a greater sense of belonging? You might think the former — indeed, previous scholarship has highlighted the importance of secure legal status for integration (which we don’t dispute) — but that’s not what we found.

In our small, qualitative study of the experiences of refugees and asylum seekers in two German towns, we found that those in town N, where the majority did not have permission to remain, felt a much greater sense of belonging than those in town E, where the majority did. 

‘I think… I’ve become a citizen of Germany. I feel good,’ said Sabir, a young man in town N who did not have a residence permit. 

‘Germany has many job opportunities, future… but it’s not our country,’ said Amer, a young man in town E, who did have a residence permit.

How to account for this? The answer, according to our data, appears to be in the reception of the townspeople:

‘I know almost five to six [local] families where I always go to eat, or who help me with things,’ said Zeynep from town N.

‘Yesterday, I sit at train station and a man asks, “Why do you look at me?”’ [imitates an angry voice], said Rayhan from town E.

The inclusive and open way in which research participants were welcomed in town N seemed to provide them with social scaffolding, underpinned by positive social representations of refugees held by the townspeople of N. This appeared to foster a sense of belonging in our research participants, and, consequently, some of them were able to identify with German culture and claim a German identity.

In contrast, participants residing in town E appeared to lack such social scaffolding and such identification. Their narratives indicated a greater sense of alienation from locals and German society. Few participants reported having personal relationships with locals, which they attributed to Germans being ‘generally private’.

This may, on one level, seem obvious — the way in which people are received impacts their sense of belonging. Yet, under Germany’s 2016 Integration Act — which contains punitive measures against refugees and asylum seekers who have not demonstrably tried to ‘integrate’ — residents of Germany have ‘keinen zusätzlichen Erfüllungsaufwand,’ or ‘no further obligations’.

The German government itself has defined integration as ‘feeling part of a community and developing a common understanding of how to live together in society.’ By explicitly stating in the law, however, that German residents have ‘no obligations’ towards achieving integration, is the government not absolving German residents of the very thing that could foster, in newcomers, the sense of belonging it seeks?

The on-going development of the National Action Plan for Integration may be a step in the right direction. The plan considers how Germany’s institutions and citizens can contribute to sustainable integration — but it remains to be seen how far this goes towards fundamentally shifting people’s understandings of what integration is: a reciprocal process undertaken by both receiving society members and newcomers.

*All names are pseudonyms. The origin countries of participants have been withheld to protect their identities.

Emily LeRoux-Rutledge is a Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology at the University of the West of England. She currently studies the psychology of migration, looking at the identities and representations of refugees, asylum seekers and other diaspora groups. Her most recent paper, ‘Refugee Identity and Integration in Germany during the European “Migration Crisis”: Why Local Community Support Matters, and Why Policy Gets It Wrong,’ was published with Carmen Lienen in the Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies.