Mistrusting Refugees


Book Description

The twentieth century has seen people displaced on an unprecedented scale and has brought concerns about refugees into sharp focus. There are forty million refugees in the world—1 in 130 inhabitants of this planet. In this first interdisciplinary study of the issue, fifteen scholars from diverse fields focus on the worldwide disruption of "trust" as a sentiment, a concept, and an experience. Contributors provide a rich array of essays that maintain a delicate balance between providing specific details of the refugee experience and exploring corresponding theories of trust and mistrust. Their subjects range widely across the globe, and include Palestinians, Cambodians, Tamils, and Mayan Indians of Guatemala. By examining what individuals experience when removed from their own culture, these essays reflect on individual identity and culture as a whole. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995. The twentieth century has seen people displaced on an unprecedented scale and has brought concerns about refugees into sharp focus. There are forty million refugees in the world—1 in 130 inhabitants of this planet. In this first interdisciplinary study of




Mistrusting Refugees


Book Description

"A welcome contribution to the literature on refugees and refugee experience. It brings a refreshingly broad range of interpretive strategies and data to bear on the problem of how humanitarian agencies, intellectuals, and political activists might best understand the conflictive experiences of refugees."—Deborah A. Poole, New School for Social Research "A momentous effort in the elaboration of a meaningful discourse on the issue of refugees."—Jean-Paul Dumont, George Mason University




Cultural Psychology of Immigrants


Book Description

This new volume provides an interdisciplinary perspective on how intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and culture shape the cultural psychology of immigrants. It demonstrates the influence transnational ties and cultural practices and beliefs play on creating the immigrant self. Distinguished scholars from a variety of fields examine the cultural psychological consequences of displacement among different immigrant communities. Cultural Psychology of Immigrants opens with a variety of theoretical perspectives on immigration and a historical overview of sociological research on immigrants. It then examines the racial discrimination of immigrants and the multifaceted influences on the creation of immigrant identities. The final section documents the pivotal role of family contexts in shaping identity. Each chapter illustrates the commonalities and differences among immigrants in the ways in which they make sense of their newfound selves in a displaced context. Intended for advanced students and researchers in the fields of psychology, social work, marriage and family therapy, public health, anthropology, sociology, education, and ethnic studies, the book also serves as a resource in courses on cultural psychology, immigrant studies, minority groups, race and ethnic relations, self and identity, culture and human development, and immigrants and mental health.




Mistrust


Book Description

Scholars have long seen trust as a foundational social good. We therefore have ample studies on building trust in free markets, on cultivating trust in the state, and on rebuilding trust through civil society. The contributors to this volume, instead, take a step back. They ask: Can mistrust ever be more than the flip side of trust, more than the sign of an absence or failure? By looking ethnographically at what a variety of actors actually do when they express mistrust, this volume offers a richly empirical trove of the social life of mistrust across a range of settings.




Not Just Victims


Book Description

Not Just Victims contains twelve oral histories based on conversations with Cambodian community leaders in eight American cities -- Long Beach, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Portland, Tacoma, and the Massachusetts towns of Fall River and Lowell. Unlike the dozens of autobiographies published by Cambodians that focus largely on their victimization, these narratives describe how Cambodian refugees have adapted to life in the United States. Sucheng Chan's extensive introduction provides a historical framework; she discusses the civil war (1970-75), the bloody Khmer Rouge revolution (1975-79), the border war during the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia (1979-89), and the additional travails faced by those who escaped to holding camps in Thailand. The book also includes an essay on oral history and a substantial bibliography.




Southeast Asian Refugees and Immigrants in the Mill City


Book Description

Original, interdisciplinary essays highlight the pain, struggles, and victories of Southeast Asian refugees and immigrants in a mid-sized New England city




Safe Haven?: A History of Refugees in America


Book Description

The notion of America as land of refuge is vital to American civic consciousness yet over the past seventy years the country has had a complicated and sometimes erratic relationship with its refugee populations. Attitudes and actions toward refugees from the government, voluntary organizations, and the general public have ranged from acceptance to rejection; from well-wrought program efforts to botched policy decisions. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary and historical material, and based on the author s three-decade experience in refugee research and policy, "Safe Haven?" provides an integrated portrait of this crucial component of American immigration and of American engagement with the world. Covering seven decades of immigration history, Haines shows how refugees and their American hosts continue to struggle with national and ethnic identities and the effect this struggle has had on American institutions and attitudes.




Refugees and the Transformation of Societies


Book Description

This series reflects the multidisciplinary nature of the field and includes within its scope international law, anthropology, medicine, geopolitics, social psychology and economics.




Refugee Support and Moral Practice in Slovakia


Book Description

This ethnography explores the political quandaries and personal dilemmas that refugee supporters—volunteers and NGO employees—in Slovakia face while working with their target group. Operating in a refugee-hostile political and public climate, they navigate scarce or absent refugee care infrastructures and strict supervision by state authorities. Building on extensive participant observation in three different refugee support organizations, the book shows how moral codes and emotional templates shape the implementation of refugee support, structuring encounters and clashes between refugees, helpers, and bureaucrats. The ethnography illustrates how, despite a plenitude of divergent constraints, the actors produce remarkably permanent makeshift solutions for “good enough” care. At the same time, it is on the level of personal encounters and clashes that ideological and practical delineations between state and non-state actors, and between refugee-hostile and refugee-friendly positions, become blurred: NGO refugee supporters sometimes converge with state policies in practices of control while state authorities occasionally become deeply invested in providing empathetic care. The book revisits narratives of illiberal backsliding and xenophobia in Central and Eastern European countries by describing the complicated emergence and perpetuation of refugee-hostile sentiments in an exemplary setting.




Urban Refugees


Book Description

Urban refugees now account for over half the total number of refugees worldwide. Yet to date, far more research has been done on refugees living in camps and settlements set up expressly for them. This book provides crucial insights into the worldwide phenomenon of refugee flows into urban settings, repercussions for those seeking protection, and the agencies and organizations tasked to assist them. It provides a comparative exploration of refugees and asylum seekers in nine urban areas in Africa, Asia and Europe to examine issues such as status recognition, international and national actors, housing, education and integration. The book explores the relationship between refugee policies of international organisations and national governments and on the ground realities and demonstrates both the diverse of circumstances in which refugees live, and their struggle for recognition, protection and livelihoods.