Search results for "Refuge"
showing 10 items of 269 documents
The politics of emotion in a parenting support programmes for refugees in Norway
2022
Enhancing social skills among citizens who are considered at risk is one of the ways in which a welfare state handles marginalised groups (Prieur et al, 2020). Universalised programmes represent a common way of strengthening the social capabilities of groups deemed in need of such skills (for example, Pettersvold and Østrem, 2019). In this article, we show that emotions perform a political role in such programmes. We proffer our arguments on the basis of data from five training sessions in the International Child Development Programme (ICDP) in a mid-sized Norwegian municipality. Mentors who are teaching the ICDP course use emotions to signal the superiority of the ICDP as a parenting ideal…
“You are special”: othering in biographies of “GDR children from Namibia”
2017
ABSTRACTThe article analyses a historical case of politically induced flight. The so-called German Democratic Republic (GDR) children from Namibia are about 430 people brought to the GDR between 1979 and 1989. They came from Namibian refugee camps and were part of a solidarity project between South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO) and the GDR. They were educated to become the Namibian elite once the country had been liberated. Their stay was to be temporary, with the children identified as Namibian by SWAPO and GDR. The article reconstructs culturalist and biological-racist forms of othering as characteristic biographical experience of the young people which deny them belonging to…
Care and gendered work in reception centers in Finland
2019
PurposeThis paper focuses on how gendered processes of working life are (re)constructed and are also challenged discursively in paid and volunteer care and work in reception centers. The purpose of this paper is to show how caring work with asylum seekers can both enhance the traditional gender order and challenge it through enabling men to have opportunities to care.Design/methodology/approachThe data were produced through qualitative interviews among paid workers and volunteers in reception centers, and analyzed through a discourse analysis approach.FindingsThree discourses of care and work were identified: a discourse on solidarity and care; a discourse on control and order; and a discou…
Tibetan Cultural Identity in Nepal: Change, Preservation, Prospects
2016
In the difficult circumstances of institutional discrimination and political pressure, the Tibetan minority in Nepal negotiate their identity with utmost communicative resourcefulness, tying their values to universal ethics. They resort to their spiritual heritage in their daily intercultural encounters, seeing it mostly as an essential mindset. Developing intercultural personhood through universalization does not challenge identity salience, if one’s culture is adhered to consciously. The respondents are optimistic about preserving their culture, provided the positive factors, such as community living and cultural education, persist. The obstacles are seen in materialistic influences, glob…
Presidential speeches and the online politics of belonging : Affective-discursive positions toward refugees in Finland and Estonia
2019
The so-called ‘refugee crisis’ has added urgency to the social dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in European societies. This study explores how emotions figure in this politics of belonging by studying their discursive mobilization in Finnish and Estonian public debates on asylum seekers. Focusing on presidential speeches addressing the refugee issue, on the one hand, and their reception by online commenters on popular tabloid news sites, on the other, the comparative analysis highlights both similarities and differences in how emotional expressions are employed in these two countries with very different experiences of taking refugees. Despite employing common discursive elements in thei…
Perceived threat and prejudice towards immigrants in Finland : A study among early, middle, and late Finnish adolescents
2017
ABSTRACTUsing integrated threat theory, this study examined how perceived threat, or fear of immigrants, manifests among early, middle, and late Finnish adolescents, and the relationship between perceived threat and prejudice among early, middle, and late adolescents. The sample consisted of 795 Finnish adolescents between 11 and 19 years of age. Realistic and symbolic threats were the most perceived threats and were more prevalent among late adolescents. There was a positive relationship between prejudice and realistic threat, and between prejudice and symbolic threat, but a negative relationship between prejudice and negative stereotyping, and this relationship remained relatively stable …
Live free or die motionless : Walking the migrant path from Italy to France
2018
This essay and the photographs examine visual traces of irregular mobility in the border landscape between Italy and France. The ruined buildings and objects witness decades of movement of undocumented people on this old migrant path across the mountains. By taking the theoretical concept of multidirectional memory (Rothberg 2009) the essay argues that the Path of Hope can be thought of as a memory site through which the issues of migration in contemporary Europe can be seen in a more sustainable light. The ruins and discarded objects link memories of different places – including different border zones – in ways that allow us to critically examine borders as a practice – rather than as exis…
Temporality in cosmopolitan solidarity : Archival activism and participatory documentary film as mediated witnessing of suffering at Europe’s borders
2019
This article develops and extends the idea of cosmopolitan solidarity to temporality through a case study of archival activism and participatory film-making. It examines mediated witnessing within the Italian online audiovisual archive Archivio delle memorie migranti, which documents and archives the experiences of contemporary migrants in Italy. The moral basis of Archivio delle memorie migranti is cosmopolitan solidarity, which is usually understood as a practice that crosses spatial and communal boundaries. However, the ethics of solidarity also bridges past, present and future generations. Through the case of Archivio delle memorie migranti, this article demonstrates the significance o…
‘We hugged each other during the cold nights’: the role of affect in an anti-deportation protest network in Finland
2021
This article analyses the role of affect and emotions in Finland’s first large-scale anti-deportation protest, the 2017 Right to Live protest in Helsinki. Despite deportation protests having recently gained scholarly attention, their emotional dimensions have not been sufficiently studied, especially as concerns the emotions of protestors with vulnerable legal status. This article is based on in-depth interviews with key activists in the anti-deportation protest network in Finland, including asylum seekers, refugees and Finnish citizens. The article argues that in order for the protest of asylum seekers facing the threat of deportation to become public and visible, it was important that cit…
Bosnia and Herzegovina: assessing health systems capacity to manage large influx of refugees and migrants. Joint report on a mission of the Health Au…
2020
The large numbers of refugees and migrants arriving in and transiting through Bosnia and Herzegovina pose new challenges to the health system, which must adapt and respond to the needs of both migrants and residents. This requires an efficient policy dialogue between the main stakeholders to share experiences and identify best practices. The WHO Regional Office for Europe, through the Migration and Health programme, supports Member States for strengthening the health sector's capacity to provide evidence-informed responses to the public health challenges for refugee and migrant health. In this regard, a joint assessment mission was carried out in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2019, using the WH…