Critical Ecological Perspective on the Negotiated Identities of a Refugee-background Woman during Resettlement

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Higher and adult education in the context of global migration

Proposal

A refugee crisis has become part of our life that affects every family around the world. We watch the news and social media that are constantly reporting about people who became refugees because of political conflicts, wars, and violence every single day. Catastrophic migration is the “existential crisis of the twenty-first century” that our society cannot ignore any longer (Suárez-Orozco, 2018, p. 14). In 2023, more than 103 million people found themselves in this ‘existential crisis’ as a result of wars, violence, economic hardship, and environmental disasters (UNHCR, 2023). Given the disproportionate number of women experiencing catastrophic migrations, it started being called in the literature as feminization of migration (Haffejee & East, 2016; Ross-Sheriff, 2011). This massive number of displaced women relocate to new countries as refugees. In their receiving context, refugee-background women undergo a process of resettlement and ultimately build new lives in a completely different place. While supporting the country and working in this country, refugee-background women still experience a lot of challenges in terms of the adaptation process during resettlement that can derail the productive paths they are on. Ignoring refugee-background experiences and failing to understand their identities prevents our society from doing social justice and paying attention to residents of this country who live, work, and study. This project addresses the CIES 2024 call for protest inequalities and assimilationist agendas and supports the decolonization of our epistemologies and migrant and refugees’ rights. The current study explores multiple shifting identities of a refugee-background woman, and how she articulates and negotiates her identities through language in the context of resettlement.
I use a critical ecological perspective framework (Suárez-Orozco et al., 2018) as it considers the effect of context (e.g., communities, resettlement, political context) on human development. In this project, I adapt this model by focusing on identity negotiation through language when identity is negotiated in interaction with each level of the system (Davies & Harré, 1999; De Fina, 2011). Naming this ecological perspective “critical,” I adopt a critical lens in my project that acknowledges structural and systemic inequalities that affect refugee-background women’s identities in the system such as patriarchy, neoliberal forces, and capitalism that affect catastrophic migrations. Originating from Critical Theory (see Fromm, 1973, 1976; Horkheimer & Adorno, 1947; Marcuse, 1964), critical means 1) to situate this project in a particular historical time, 2) to make this work political, 3) to contextualize it, and, finally, 4) to do this work for social transformation (Gounari, 2020). By conceptualizing this framework as a critical ecological perspective, my goal is not only to understand what is happening to refugee-background women’s identities but also to orient this work toward critique and change of society with the belief in a transformation of existing issues towards refugee populations. Critical also means to acknowledge the intersection of oppression that refugee-background women experience due to their race, gender, class, and other identities (see Crenshaw, 1989; Delgado & Stefancic, 2013). Taking a critical lens in this research allows seeing that ecological perspective that Bronfenbrenner (1979, 2015) and (Suárez-Orozco et al., 2011, 2015, 2018) write about not only affects refugee-background women but presents an opportunity for them to resist and transform existing inequalities. Critical also understands refugee-background women’s agency and power to present counterforce in the form of narratives.
This project draws on critical ethnography with the parts of narrative analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to understand identities of refugee-background women and the discourses that they utilize to negotiate their identities during resettlement (Carspecken, 2006; Morton & Mills, 2013; Thomas, 1993; Wei, 2019). I chose critical ethnography as a method for this research because it has a specific purpose of highlighting and emphasizing the voices of the marginalized population in comparison with traditional ethnography. In this presentation, I will present a case of a refugee-background woman Susan from Guatemala during resettlement in Boston drawing on ethnographic observations, interviews, researcher field notes, and participant’s journals.
Through thematic, discourse, and narrative analysis, the data revealed the discrepancies between how society (e.g., political context, resettlement agencies) position Susan in Boston as a “refugee” and how she sees her identity at the individual level as a “superwoman,” mother, student support counselor, community college student, and employee. The findings have important implications for refugee resettlement language programs. Instead of imposing on and assuming identities of refugee-background women and predicting how they adapt to the U.S. context racially, socially, and linguistically, I invite activists, scholars, teachers, volunteers, and resettlement programs to ask and include refugee-background women’s voices and stories into agenda of citizenship and language classes.
Thus, migration has been a focus of social studies research for decades; however, there is still a gap in understanding how language plays out in identity formation during resettlement for refugee populations. From a theoretical perspective, this study will be transdisciplinary, bridging theories of an ecological systems model (Suárez-Orozco et al., 2011, 2015; Suárez-Orozco, 2018) from Psychology and identity from Applied Linguistics research (De Fina, 2011; Harré & Van Langenhove 1991, 1999; Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004) with a focus on the concept of transnationalism (Suárez-Orozco et al., 2011) from Migration studies. From a practical point of view, resettlement programs in Boston and other areas can adopt policies that will consider, respect, and recognize former refugees’ visions of themselves instead of only focusing on their self-efficiency and employability. Methodologically, this project will employ critical ethnography (Carspecken, 2006) with Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and narrative analysis (De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2008; De Fina, 2013) that has not been done before in the research with refugee-background women specifically. Critical ethnography as a method will serve as a political act that co-constructs knowledge of the researcher and participants in order to do justice to the population I am working with. Relying on an asset-based orientation towards former refugees, this project will expand the understanding of adaptation and integration for resettlement agencies that can take into account the complexity and uniqueness of refugee-background women's identity negotiation process. Such knowledge will support a healthy and sustainable process of adapting to a new environment.

Author

• Iuliia Fakhrutdinova, University of Massachusetts Boston