Braiding stories, singing memories: narratives and displacements of a refugee woman

Using ethnography and a research methodology developed for this research project, this article sets out to describe the trajectories of a female refugee and the relationship she has established with her new city of residence. Ruth was born in Angola, but grew up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She is 35 years old and has lived in Rio de Janeiro since 2014. She has three children and works as an actress and singer. She reconnects to her roots and reinvents herself in the new territory through spending time with Congolese women in a market in Madureira and in an evangelical church in Brás de Pina. The methodology, using photos, drawings and objects, reveals the experiences of a Black refugee woman in the city where she has come to live. The article intends to reflect on the way these women have reinvented themselves based on the place of the frontier and how they have given different meanings to their identities in their new place.

Making Do: How a Somali Refugee Woman Experiences Social Mobility Amidst Precarity in Transit in Indonesia

This article presents an account of Faduma, a Somali woman currently living in Jakarta, Indonesia, in order to illustrate the creativity, resilience and adaptability required to make do as a refugee with little to no formal support in a rather hostile environment. For Faduma, Indonesia presents such an environment. As it offers no formal protection for asylum seekers and refugees and only tolerates their temporary presence without guaranteeing them any fundamental rights, such as the right to work, it can be characterised as a ‘deviant destination’ for refugees in search of durable and effective solutions. This article analyses Faduma's strategies, embedded in the macro-political context of forced migration, the Global North's externalised border policies, the absence of safe pathways, and the lack of proper refugee protection in Southeast Asia, for finding informal employment, attaining new skills and education, and forming strategic friendships with Indonesians and expatriates as a means of dealing with racism, exploitation and multifaceted precarity. We selected Faduma's case from amongst a number of encounters that we had with Somali refugees in Indonesia because of her extraordinary involvement with the Somali community. While the current toleration of refugee activities by Indonesian authorities enables refugees to survive in transit, we argue that such unintentional and informal protection is not a durable approach for larger groups of refugees enduring prolonged periods of waiting.

Staying at Home

In the spring of 2020 the novel Coronavirus upended life in New Jersey, US, precipitating an unprecedented state lockdown of 9 million residents. The essay reflects on the author's experience of the lockdown and her relationship to a Syrian refugee woman resettled nearby. The author identifies their shared experiences staying at home and prioritizing the collective good in the midst of a pandemic.

The Media Representation of Refugee Women in Spain

Research on the migratory phenomenon has produced many studies and from various disciplines. However, the knowledge that citizens have of this phenomenon is linked to the discourse by the media. It is not different in the case of refuge and asylum. The contribution of the authors involves questioning to what extent the media are present in shaping the image of migrations. Until now, the image presented is negative, problematic, conflictive, ethnic, and alarming. But this chapter focuses on refugees and, in particular, refugee women. In the same way that research on the migratory phenomenon shows that immigrant women have not been the subject of notable media coverage, it is to be expected that refugee women are not either. For this reason, it is interesting to check the degree of media coverage of the migratory phenomenon in the press (including the mobility of refugees) during the so-called “refugee crisis” in Europe. The chapter focuses on the news that include the refugee woman. For this purpose, the news published in the Spanish newspaper El País are used.

Mobility assemblages and lines of flight in women’s narratives of forced displacement

In this article I take the notion of the mobility assemblage as a theoretical lens through which I consider entanglements between refugee and migrant women on the move, intense experiences of gendered labour, and affective encounters in crossing borders and following lines of flight. The analysis revolves around the life-story of a young refugee woman, who recounts her experiences of travelling to Greece. What emerges from her narrative is a whirl of lines of flight that deterritorialize her from patriarchal regimes, harsh border practices, labour exploitation and the pain of separation on a plane of remaking her present and reimagining her future.