“Shield” identities: How refugee background women navigate adversities within ecological systems of resettlement

• In Event: Advancing Gender Equality through Education and Peace-Oriented Development

Proposal

Catastrophic migration (Suárez-Orozco, 2018) not only affects the lives of refugee background women (RBW) but also their identities. Identities are their perceptions of who they are in this world in relation to different forces of their environment that impact their lives. Even though migration has been a focus of social science research for decades, there is still a gap in understanding how language plays out in identity formation during resettlement for RBW. To address this gap, I explore discourses that RBW draw on to negotiate their identities during resettlement. From a theoretical perspective, this study is transdisciplinary, bridging theories of an ecological systems model (Suárez-Orozco et al., 2011, 2015, 2018; Suárez-Orozco, 2018) and identity (De Fina, 2011; Harré & Van Langenhove 1991, 1999; Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004) with a focus on the concept of transnationalism (Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001).
I conducted a critical ethnographic study from 2022 – 2025 that incorporated observations, semi-structured interviews, and journals of RBW during their resettlement in the Boston area. Participants ranged from 19 to 43 years old, and their maternal statuses were either single or married with children. Specifically, I asked eight RBW -- Susan and Yas from Guatemala, Selin and Yulia from Russia, Pearl from Afghanistan, and Stephanie, Fabiola, and Jordani from Haiti -- to think about their experiences in the United States and reflect on how they see themselves in various contexts of their lives, for example, at home, workplace, ESL classes, neighborhood, and resettlement agencies – the ecological systems of resettlement. I found out that the overarching theme for all RBW is a “shield” identity that “withstands,” “endures,” and holds fast in the face of different kinds of adversity in the United States during resettlement.
The women of this study see themselves as a “shield” in the ecological system of resettlement that withstands the surrounding discourses such as legal definitions of “refugee” of the macrosystem or the U.S. immigration system; the paradox of simultaneous hypervisibility and invisibility of the exosystem, the increasingly toxic U.S. political and social context, and the complexity of family dynamics in the microsystem. Even though external forces or discourses of different systems affect or reshape how women perceive themselves, it does not define them, as all women negotiated these discourses through their counter-discourses of how they identify themselves. Also, RBW presented the discourses of how emotionally and physically challenging it was to endure and protect the shield during adaptation. The findings from the interviews, field notes, and journals demonstrated an extremely unique, multifaceted, and complex process of identity negotiation for RBW. This study shows how the resettlement process is a multilayered process of existing surrounding discourses that face RBW’s counter-discourses. Finally, the findings of this study urge us to step away from the discourse of immigrant success stories, the American Dream, assimilation, and integration, and suggest seeing adaptation as a complex process with the focus on identity negotiation.

Author

• Iuliia Fakhrutdinova, University of Massachusetts Boston