From the Asylum Officials’ Point of View: Schemes of Perception and Evaluation in Refugee Status Determination

• In Event: 1154 - Refugees: Comparative Perspectives from Above and Below

Abstract

How does the state determine that someone qualifies for refugee status? Existing scholarship has focused on the characteristics of asylum officials and asylum seekers, and on the case features of asylum applications, to understand refugee status determination. Yet these elements have been shown to play inconsistent roles. Given this, this paper turns its attention from individual characteristics and case features to how asylum officials make sense of asylum seekers and their claims. Utilizing a cognitive sociological approach, it details the schemes of perception and evaluation at work in refugee status determination—the cognitive prisms through which officials perceive and interpret those seeking safe haven. Based on an ethnography of the asylum-screening process in Brazil, this paper delineates four key cognitive schemes—credibility, gravity, affinity and novelty—and their variable development and operations in situated context. In doing, this paper suggests the utility of cognitive approaches when studying the everyday workings of the state more broadly.

Author

• Katherine Christine Jensen, University of Texas-Austin