Bhutanese Refugee Youth Identity in the United States: A Phenomenological Study

• In Event: From Forced Displacement to Opportunity: Promise and Possibilities in Refugee Education

Abstract

Framed by poststructuralist theory of identity, this phenomenological study explores Bhutanese refugee youth’s lived experiences before- and after-resettlement and the ways that these experiences influence their identity navigation. Data from this study come from a two-year phenomenological study with a recently resettled Bhutanese refugee community in a Northeastern U.S. city. By focusing on four Bhutanese refugee youth and two current Bhutanese refugee youth club collaborators who used to be teachers in the camp in Nepal, the findings indicate the essential nature of refugee youth’s lived experience is a way of being, becoming, and imagining. This study highlights refugee identity as a multi-layered and multi-faceted construct, which is related to others, contested, imagined, power-driven, and constituted by social practice.

Author

• Xia Chao, Duquesne University