Who Curates the Refugee Story? How Racialized Immigration Policies Drive the Global Refugee Narrative

• In Event: 2384 - Section on International Migration Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 14. Race and Racialization

Abstract

This paper is about the social construction of the refugee story – the overarching global narrative that shapes knowledge production and scientific inquiry. Despite an established literature about the refugee story, the process of revealing how political interests influence knowledge production about refugees remains a contemporary project. Who is given the platform to speak about refugee experiences? How are these refugee stories curated and amplified? How do racial and national differences among refugee populations influence the ascription of worthiness and access to rights?

I demonstrate that since the start of the Syrian conflict in 2011, refugee stories are selected, produced, and curated from the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. These stories are intentionally used to construct the global refugee narrative, which perpetuates the interests of powerful states in the Global North. I unravel the social construction of the global refugee narrative in five steps to describe which refugee stories are excluded. This project is important because scholarly and policy-relevant conclusions rely on the refugee story to make sense of social reality. I argue that the “facts” that underlie knowledge production about global refugee displacement need to be questioned and deconstructed. This research is informed by 175 interviews with Syrian refugees, Jordanian citizens, and UN, NGO, and Jordanian government officials that I conducted in 2016 and 2017.

Author

• Rawan Arar