Search results for "refugee"
showing 10 items of 255 documents
The Migration Crisis: An Introduction
2020
In 2015, the EU and its member states struggled to coordinate, communicate, and cooperate on the migration crisis as the chapters in this section show. Schilde and Wallace Goodman point out that while border security contains examples of deeper integration, asylum management policy has followed the scenarios of breaking down and muddling through. All the authors highlight the Dublin convention as particularly ill-devised and thus paving the way for the refugee crisis. Bosilca finds evidence for breaking down in addition to minimal reforms of border security policy that constitute muddling through. Crawford argues that the migration crisis provides evidence both of muddling through and headi…
Misrecognizing Asylum. Causes, modalities and consequences of the crisis of a fundamental human right.
2017
The so-called contemporary refugee crisis can be defined as a European “right to asylum crisis”, a crisis of its fundamental principles: the protection of asylum seekers’ rights and the related principle of non-refoulement. Modalities and trends marking the recognition of asylum applicants as refugees, and of migrants as asylum seekers, will be considered along with the current implementation of the notion of a “safe country” within the context of EU texts on migration developed since 2015. This “right to asylum crisis” is then briefly analyzed as both a symptom and a cause of the European Union project’s wider political and cultural crisis.
Europe and refugees : 1938 and 2015-16
2018
Ahonen attempts to provide some historical contextualization for the refugee crisis that has dominated much of European public and political debate since 2015. He draws comparisons between the crisis-ridden present and the decade of the previous century that was particularly laden with anticipation of disaster and doom: the 1930s. More specifically, his article explores parallels in public discussions of refugees by European political leaders and media commentators in 1938, on the one hand, and 2015–16, on the other. The coverage of 1938 focuses on the Evian Conference, organized to discuss the problem of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, while the analysis of 2015–16 concerns the period f…
An analysis of metaphors in the biographies of the ‘GDR children of Namibia’
2020
Metaphors are linguistically dense images that transfer terms from their original usage to a different context and describe actions and objects beyond their literal meaning. This article uses Rudol...
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 …