Relational Refugees


Book Description

Children imitate behaviors and learn values from the adults who care for them. In the absence of relationships or healthy, clearly transmitted values, children flounder. They are, one could say, relational refugees. Those in ministerial leadership positions likewise need someone to imitate or learn from, a type of mentor. This mimesis or copying of behavior, ideas, attitudes, lives, examples, and ministries of significant others has a long legacy in the African-American community. Such mimesis entails trying on different dimensions of ministry until one finds one's unique approach to it. In the African-American context the core of mimesis is liberation. Most models of liberation have ignored or trivialized the significance of caring and supportive relationships to the liberation process. Yet ministry occurs in contexts where, increasingly, cross-generational, extended family, and church relationships are lacking. Such nurturing relationships where mentoring occurs and where values are handed on are often marred when the debilitating messages of racism are internalized without being countered. Practical methods of ministry, Wimberly suggests, must attend to the ways these messages are learned, and work to counter them by ensuring that there are no relational refugees. Wimberly's case studies deal with a family whose son is dying of AIDS, violence, black male and female relationships, adolescent identity in society, aging and parenthood, drug addiction, and consumerism and the American dream.




A Relational Ethics of Immigration


Book Description

To understand the ethics of immigration, we need to start from the way it is enacted and understood by everyday actors: through practices of hospitality and hostility. Drawing on feminist and poststructuralist understandings of ethics and hospitality, this book offers a new approach to immigration ethics by exploring state and societal responses to immigration from the Global North and South. Rather than treating ethics as a determinable code for how we ought to behave toward strangers, it explores hospitality as a relational ethics -- an ethics without moralism -- that aims to understand and possibly transform the way people already do embrace and deflect obligations and responsibilities to each other. Building from specific examples in Colombia, Turkey and Tanzania, as well as the EU, US and UK, hospitality is developed as a structural and emotional practice of drawing and redrawing boundaries of inside and outside, belonging and non-belonging. It thereby actively creates a society as a communal space with a particular ethos: from a welcoming home to a racialised hostile environment. Hospitality is therefore treated as a critical mode of reflecting on how we create a 'we' and relate to others through entangled histories of colonialism, displacement, friendship and exploitation. Only through such a reflective understanding can we seek to transform immigration practices to better reflect the real and aspirational ethos of a society. Instead of simple answers -- removing borders or creating global migration regimes -- the book argues for grounded negotiations that build from existing local capacities to respond to immigration.




Working with Refugee Families


Book Description

This important new book explores how to support refugee family relationships in promoting post-trauma recovery and adaptation in exile.




Working with Refugee Families


Book Description

The field of refugee family research and intervention forms a growing field of scientific study, focussing on the refugee family as the central niche of coping with, and giving meaning to, trauma, cultural uprooting, and exile. This important new book develops an understanding of the role of refugee family relationships in post-trauma healing and provides an in-depth analysis of central clinical-therapeutic themes in refugee family psychosocial interventions. Expert contributions from across transcultural psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy and social work have provided chapters on post-trauma reconstruction in refugee family relationships, trauma care for refugee families, and intersectorial psychosocial interventions with refugee families. This exploration of refugee family systems in both research and clinical practice aims to promote a systemic perspective in health and social services working with families in refugee mental health care.




Relational Formations of Race


Book Description

Relational Formations of Race brings African American, Chicanx/Latinx, Asian American, and Native American studies together in a single volume, enabling readers to consider the racialization and formation of subordinated groups in relation to one another. These essays conceptualize racialization as a dynamic and interactive process; group-based racial constructions are formed not only in relation to whiteness, but also in relation to other devalued and marginalized groups. The chapters offer explicit guides to understanding race as relational across all disciplines, time periods, regions, and social groups. By studying race relationally, and through a shared context of meaning and power, students will draw connections among subordinated groups and will better comprehend the logic that underpins the forms of inclusion and dispossession such groups face. As the United States shifts toward a minority-majority nation, Relational Formations of Race offers crucial tools for understanding today’s shifting race dynamics.




Relational Social Work Practice with Diverse Populations


Book Description

Social work and relational theory have long been clinical comrades, given their shared goals and ideals. This close fit continues to be productive as client populations and their needs grow more diverse. Clinical Social Work Practice with Diverse Populations sorts through vital matters of race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion and social status--and addresses groups and issues often seen in practice but rarely encountered in print--with a profound understanding of the healing power of relational-based treatment. Case examples illustrate all stages of social work process, offering practice guidelines for working with members of diverse groups while emphasizing the uniqueness of every therapeutic dyad. The coverage recognizes the multiple relationships that comprise individuals' lives as well as the individuality that co-exists within group identity. And the contributors carefully show readers how to check themselves for biases and us-versus-them thinking and how to develop confidence along with clinical skills. Included in this first-of-its-kind text: · Practice technique and research support for relational therapy. · Whiteness: Deconstruction of a practice paradox. · Racial and ethnic diversity, including African American, Latino, Asian American, and Asian Indian clients. · Religious diversity: evangelical Christians, Muslim, and Orthodox Jewish clients. · Diversity of sexual identity: LGBT clients. · Diversity of life-altering experiences: combat veterans, reentry from incarceration, homelessness. · Plus: background chapters providing a framework for applying relational theory to social work. Bridging the knowledge gaps between the diversity literature and the practical literature, Relational Social Work Practice with Diverse Populations supplies clinical social work professionals, educators, and counselors with tools and concepts for effective, efficient practice.




Seeking Refuge


Book Description

Recipient of Christianity Today's Award of Merit in Politics and Public Life, 2016 ------ What will rule our hearts: fear or compassion? We can’t ignore the refugee crisis—arguably the greatest geo-political issue of our time—but how do we even begin to respond to something so massive and complex? In Seeking Refuge, three experts from World Relief, a global organization serving refugees, offer a practical, well-rounded, well-researched guide to the issue. Who are refugees and other displaced peoples? What are the real risks and benefits of receiving them? How do we balance compassion and security? Drawing from history, public policy, psychology, many personal stories, and their own unique Christian worldview, the authors offer a nuanced and compelling portrayal of the plight of refugees and the extraordinary opportunity we have to love our neighbors as ourselves.




Strangers Either Way


Book Description

Croatia gained the world's attention during the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. In this context its image has been overshadowed by visions of ethnic conflict and cleansing, war crimes, virulent nationalism, and occasionally even emergent regionalism. Instead of the norm, this book offers a diverse insight into Croatia in the 1990s by dealing with one of the consequences of the war: the more or less forcible migration of Croats from Serbia and their settlement in Croatia, their "ethnic homeland." This important study shows that at a time in which Croatia was perceived as a homogenized nation-in-the-making, there were tensions and ruptures within Croatian society caused by newly arrived refugees and displaced persons from Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Refugees who, in spite of their common ethnicity with the homeland population, were treated as foreigners; indeed, as unwanted aliens.




That They Might Seek Him


Book Description

While state governments determine the “Who?” “How many?” and “Under what conditions?” of immigration, God has determined the “Why?” He orchestrates the times and locations of the nations “that they might seek Him” (Acts 17:24–27). The sovereign God of the universe has redemptive purpose in the movements of the people. In many instances, the formerly “unreached” are moving “within reach.” In God’s plan, Christ-followers are instruments of compassion and ambassadors of hope. They are invited to respond. That They Might Seek Him: Introduction to Migration Ministry is written with this responsibility in mind. Targeting both students and practitioners, it informs, inspires, and equips. •Learn what the Bible says about migration . . . then and now. •Respond to factors at play in immigration policy development. •Embrace the challenges of message contextualization and migrant integration. •Identify tools for fruitful engagement. •Develop a strategy for fruitful ministry.




Comparative Regional Protection Frameworks for Refugees


Book Description

This collection focuses on regional approaches to refugee protection, and specifically upon the norms, and the norm entrepreneurs of those approaches. It considers how recent crises in refugee protection (such as the Syrian and Andaman Sea crises) have highlighted the strengths and limits of regional approaches to refugee protection and the importance of looking closely at the underlying norms, and the identities and activities of the relevant ‘norm entrepreneurs’ at the regional level. It compares the norms of refugee protection that have evolved in three regions: the EU, Latin America and the South East Asian region, to identify which norms of refugee protection have been ‘internalised’ in the three regional contexts and to contextualise the processes. The authors demonstrate the need for awareness of the roles of different norm ‘entrepreneurs’ such as states, international organisations and civil society, in developing and promoting basic norms on refugee protection. This book was originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of Human Rights.




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