scholarly journals ‘If I Die here, I’m a Hero!’ On Masculinity and Vulnerability Among Male Asylum Seekers

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Palillo
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Asylum Seeker ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
The Self ◽  
International Protection ◽  
A Site

For asylum seekers, masculinity is often a site of conflict, negotiated through competing discourses and public narratives about what it means to be an asylum seeker. Here, the male ‘genuine refugee’ is often depicted as a feminised, passive victim who ‘deserves’ humanitarian protection on the base of his vulnerability. Focusing on the crossing of the desert to Libya, this article analyses asylum seekers’ positioning of themselves as ‘men’ through their own narratives as well as the ways in which they engage with vulnerability, victimhood and agency in their storytelling. In particular, the focus lies on two cases, of Hakeem and David, selected from within 36 life history interviews with asylum seekers, refugees, and international protection holders collected in Sicily. For these men, the refugee journey is narrated as an accomplishment not only in terms of receiving asylum, but also in terms of their masculinity, exalting qualities such as endurance, courage, and competence. Two images, of the soldier and the hero, are presented as imaginary positioning of the self. This positioning appears to resolve performative tensions around masculinity/refugeeness, contesting the dominant image of the passive, feminized, helpless subject at the heart of ‘the genuine refugee’ public narrative. This might also be read as a strategy to reconcile profound questions about identity, the self, and experiences related to trauma and the loss of masculine status in the context of forced migration. 

scholarly journals Women Victim of Trafficking Seeking Asylum in Italy An Ethnographic Perspective on the Regularisation Processes

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Devisri Nambiar ◽  
Serena Scarabello
Keyword(s):  
Human Trafficking ◽  
Asylum Seeker ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Migrant Women ◽  
International Protection ◽  
North East ◽  
Critical Issues ◽  
Reception Centre

This study, drawing on ethnographic observations of the regularization processes of two migrant women victim of human trafficking and who claimed for international protection in Italy, aims at contributing on the debate on the intersection between the asylum system and the anti-trafficking projects, focusing on how it concretely works in a specific local context and highlighting open challenges and critical issues. The first woman is hosted in a reception centre for asylum seekers, the second one in a shelter of the anti-trafficking project in North-East Italy. During their migratory trajectories, both women were recruited and transported in order to be sexually exploited and both (self-)identified, at different stages of their regularization process, as victims of trafficking. In our analysis, we will focus both on the positioning of the asylum seeker women and on the perspective of the operators, trying to understand in which situations these perspectives converged or diverged, in term of choices, power hierarchies and strategies of resistances.

Health, integration and agency: Sport participation experiences of asylum seekers

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clemens Ley ◽  
Felix Karus ◽  
Lisa Wiesbauer ◽  
María Rato Barrio ◽  
Ramon Spaaij
Keyword(s):  
Asylum Seeker ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Sport Participation ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
Social Recognition ◽  
Social Connection ◽  
Health Issues ◽  
Instrumental Case Study ◽  
Over Time

Abstract Politicians, scholars, and practitioners have drawn attention to social and health benefits of sport participation in the context of forced migration and refugee settlement. This study aims to progress conceptual and practical understandings of how asylum seekers’ past and present experiences shape their sport participation. We present an instrumental case study drawn from the Movi Kune programme to discuss the experiences of an asylum seeker holistically, in a particular context in time and space. The findings illustrate how pre-migration, migratory, and present experiences of living in prolonged uncertainty and liminality all strongly affect sport participation and its health and integration outcomes. The results further show that sport participation was an opportunity to perform agency, experience mastery, coping, and social recognition, promoting positive self-efficacy beliefs, health and social connection over time. Our findings extend the literature by indicating that sport practices can enhance human agency to cope with health issues and distressing past and present experiences during the asylum-seeking process.

Data Privacy and Displacement: A Cultural Approach

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saskia Witteborn
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Data Privacy ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
The Self ◽  
South East Asia ◽  
Cultural Approach ◽  
Communication Culture ◽  
Derived Data ◽  
Asylum Seekers And Refugees

Abstract Recent research has pointed to the increasing impact of digitally derived data on forced migration processes, including legal mechanisms for accessing social media profiles of asylum seekers. These developments raise the issue of data privacy, specifically how asylum seekers understand data privacy and protect their data. This article pays particular attention to cultural variants of data privacy. Culture, here, refers to a communication culture linked to displacement, with safety as a key code and variant of data privacy. For the asylum seekers and refugees from South(east) Asia, the Middle East and African nations, safety was a concern in daily digital practice. Safety was a relational way of being, exercised through selective contacts and playful presentations of the self. Those presentations were deeply embedded in the logics of social media and stood in contrast to narratives of persecution, potentially posing problems for asylum claim determination in the future. Based on the lack of awareness of asylum seekers about data privacy and safety, a data safety workshop was designed, available on GitHub.

Dominant News Frames, Society’s Memory, and the African Asylum Seekers’ Protest in Israel

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 405-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noam Tirosh
Keyword(s):  
Asylum Seeker ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Traditional Media ◽  
News Frames ◽  
The Past ◽  
A Site ◽  
Printed Press

This study questions the role of media in the formation of society’s memory regarding the asylum seeker struggle in Israel. Through analyzing 180 news articles published during the daily coverage of the refugees’ protest in Israel between December 2013 and January 2014, this study offers an opportunity to explore the mediated environment that also shapes the refugees’ situation in Israel and the role of the printed press in a memory contestation. The study demonstrates that while traditional media are a site in which different versions of the past, even including the refugees’ own version, are being contested and evaluated, they are not enough to guarantee that refugees will gain recognition as such, because traditional media maintain the power to shape and construct the debate in ways that do not always support the refugees’ claims.

scholarly journals “Do you understand (me)?” negotiating mutual understanding by using gaze and environmentally coupled gestures between two deaf signing participants

2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nina Sivunen ◽  
Elina Tapio
Keyword(s):  
Asylum Seeker ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
The State ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
Multimodal Analysis ◽  
Semiotic Resources ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
Language Competencies ◽  
Unrealistic Expectations ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractIn this paper we explore the use of multimodal and multilingual semiotic resources in interactions between two deaf signing participants, a researcher and an asylum seeker. The focus is on the use of gaze and environmentally coupled gestures. Drawing on multimodal analysis and linguistic ethnography, we demonstrate how gaze and environmentally coupled gestures are effective semiotic resources for reaching mutual understanding. The study provides insight into the challenges and opportunities (deaf) asylum seekers, researchers, and employees of reception centres or the state may encounter because of the asymmetrical language competencies. Our concern is that such asymmetrical situations may be created and maintained by ignoring visual and embodied resources in interaction and, in the case of deaf asylum seekers, by unrealistic expectations towards conventionalized forms of international sign.

scholarly journals Borders and resilience: Asylum seeker reception at the securitized Finnish-Swedish border

2021 ◽  
pp. 239965442110000
Author(s):  
Eeva-Kaisa Prokkola
Keyword(s):  
Asylum Seeker ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Border Crossings ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Border Controls ◽  
And Control ◽  
Cross Border Cooperation

The past decade has witnessed a shift from “open borders” policies and cross-border cooperation towards heightened border securitization and the building of border walls. In the EU context, since the migration influx of 2015–2016, many Member States have retained the re-instituted Schengen border controls intended to be temporary. Such heightened border securitization has produced high levels of anxiety among various populations and increased societal polarization. This paper focuses on the processes underpinning asylum seeker reception at the re-bordered Finnish-Swedish border and in the Finnish border town of Tornio. The asylum process is studied from the perspective of local authorities and NGO actors active in the everyday reception, care and control practices in the border securitization environment enacted in Tornio in 2015. The analysis highlights how the ‘success’ of everyday reception work at the Tornio border crossing was bound to the historical openness of the border and pre-existing relations of trust and cooperation between different actors at various scales. The paper thus provides a new understanding of the significance of borders and border crossings from the perspective of resilience and highlights some of the paradoxes of border securitization. It notes that although border closures are commonly envisioned as a direct response to forced migration, the everyday practices and capacities of the asylum reception at the Finnish-Swedish border are themselves highly dependent on pre-existing border crossings and cross-border cooperation.

Narrative constructions and the life history issue in brain–emotions relations

2012 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 168-169
Author(s):  
Zsolt Unoka ◽  
Eszter Berán ◽  
Csaba Pléh
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Emotional Reactions ◽  
The Self ◽  
Emotion Development ◽  
Constructivist View ◽  
Pathological Conditions ◽  
Narrative Constructions ◽  
Contextual Dependency

AbstractEmotional reactions are rather flexible, due to the schema-like organization of complex socio-emotional situations. Some data on emotion development, and on certain pathological conditions such as alexithymia, give further support for the psychological constructivist view put forward by Lindquist et al. Narrative organization is a key component of this schematic organization. The self-related nature of narrative organization provides scaffolding to the contextual dependency of emotions.

The Spiritualization of Politics and the Technologies of Resistant Body

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-211
Author(s):  
Ashjan Ajour
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Political Prisoners ◽  
Decisive Factor ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Hunger Strike ◽  
Technologies Of The Self ◽  
Principal Tool ◽  
A Site

Abstract This article explores the body as a site of subjectivity production during a hunger strike in Occupied Palestine. It further explores the former political prisoners’ theory of subjectivity as it emerges through their praxis and philosophy of freedom. Although the body is the principal tool that the hunger strikers use, they don't consider it the decisive factor in attaining their goal. For that they build on the immaterial strength that develops with the deterioration of the body and from which they construct the concept of rouh (soul). This is expressed through the formation of contradictory binaries: body versus soul and body versus mind. The article shows that the hunger strike not only is a political strategy for liberation; it also moves into a spiritualization of the struggle. It uses and problematizes Foucault's “technologies of the self” to theorize the specific formation of subjectivity in the Palestinian hunger strike under colonial conditions, and it contributes to theories of subjectivation. The hunger strikers, in their interaction with the dispossession of the colonial power, invent technologies of resistance to transcend the colonial and carceral constraints on their freedom and create the capacity for the transformation from a submissive subject to a resistant one.

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