Ontological Security, Identity, and Movement of the People: Barack Obama’s Syrian Refugee Policy

This article explores fathering practices among Syrian refugee families in Sweden. Syrian refugees provide an example of people who migrated because of a single major event: the war in Syria. The article examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on fathering practices. The Swedish COVID-19 strategy differed from those adopted in many other countries. Lockdowns were minimal and were not stringently enforced, based on the assumption that individuals would trust the authorities and would take personal responsibility for complying with their guidelines and recommendations. Previous research suggests that migrants and other vulnerable groups were not always well informed about the public policies introduced prior to and during the pandemic. The article draws on empirical data from a wider research project on the family lives of Syrian migrants in Sweden. The authors present their findings from an analysis of eleven ethnographically informed semi-structured interviews, carried out before and during the pandemic, with married fathers who had been living in Sweden for several years. In this article, they focus on three cases representing fathers with varied educational backgrounds and employment histories. These families had in common what are considered by Swedish standards to be overcrowded living conditions; they were forced to accept close family proximity, both physically and emotionally, as they no longer had the supportive networks they were used to in Syria. The three fathers were found to rely more heavily on information provided by the people with whom they were in contact in Sweden than on policies and recommendations from the authorities. These findings confirmed that the previous experiences among refugees of shifting policies regarding migration and integration had lowered their trust in government. They had learnt that they needed to rely on mutual dependency not only between spouses, but also between parents and children.

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Towards Empowerment and Sustainability: Reforming America's Syrian Refugee Policy

SSRN Electronic Journal ◽

10.2139/ssrn.3324792 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Sahar F. Aziz ◽

Joanna Gardner ◽

Omar Rana

Keyword(s):

Refugee Policy ◽

Syrian Refugee

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German Refugee Policy in the Wake of the Syrian Refugee Crisis

“Guests and Aliens”: Re-Configuring New Mobilities in the Eastern Mediterranean After 2011 - with a special focus on Syrian refugees ◽

10.4000/books.ifeagd.1878 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Christoph H. Schwarz

Keyword(s):

Refugee Crisis ◽

Refugee Policy ◽

Syrian Refugee ◽

Syrian Refugee Crisis

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Living Alone towards the End of Life

Ageing and Society ◽

10.1017/s0144686x00003147 ◽

1996 ◽

Vol 16 (1) ◽

pp. 75-91 ◽

Cited By ~ 19

Author(s):

Clive Seale

Keyword(s):

End Of Life ◽

Independent Living ◽

Living Alone ◽

Loss Of Control ◽

Ontological Security ◽

Self Identity ◽

Social Death ◽

Placement Decisions ◽

The People ◽

The Face

ABSTRACTDrawing on the accounts given by 163 relatives, friends and others who knew a sample of people who lived alone in the last twelve months of their lives, this paper examines a variety of strategies used by speakers to maintain their moral identities. Respondents sought to locate themselves as members of a community of care by stressing their activity in surveillance of the living conditions of those who lived alone, describing their part in the orchestration of help by members of a team of professional and lay carers, and in conducting negotiations over the placement in institutions of people who failed to maintain adequate reputations for independent living. A variety of strategies for justifying or excusing placement decisions—including criticisms of the behaviour of the people who lived alone—are described. At the same time, the accounts are read as a resource for understanding the perspective of the people who lived alone. People who live alone towards the end of life face particularly pressing threats to their capacity to maintain meaning and purpose. Declining physical capacity threatens loss of control and the onset of social death, conspiring to undermine ontological security. The struggle to maintain a reputation for independence in the face of neighbourly surveillance for signs of slippage is described. The paper concludes by identifying a central dilemma for carers: how to provide care that allows its recipient to manage self-identity independently.

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