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Refugee resettlement is described as primarily a humanitarian solution or a migratory pathway. These characterisations may be accurate, but they are not comprehensive. We argue that such framing influences scholarly analyses of resettlement’s scope and impact and introduces conceptual blind spots that limit critical inquiry. We propose understanding resettlement as an institution embedded in a complex network of actors, relations, and practices. The authors of this Special Issue reveal that resettlement is not a passive process. They demonstrate how refugees actively strategize to become resettle-able, advocate for others within their networks, or even reject resettlement altogether. Several contributions expand the discourse by centreing perspectives from the Global South, examining how resettlement operates from Southern host countries. These dynamics underscore how the specter of resettlement shapes refugee experiences, even when the prospect of being resettled is unattainable.
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This paper examines how nonprofit resettlement agencies (RAs) in the United States navigate systemic funding inadequacies by constructing local “resettlement networks.” Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with RAs across the country, we demonstrate that these networks are forged and sustained through the instrumentalization of refugees as resources exchanged with donors, landlords, employers, politicians, and volunteers. We argue that this instrumentalization—often hidden behind humanitarian rhetoric—can generate coercive, exploitative relationships and (re)produces inequalities across refugee populations. Furthermore, this dynamic embeds precarity into the resettlement system, as sharp declines in refugee arrivals can lead resettlement networks to disintegrate, leaving refugees entitled to services adrift and undermining state capacity. Our findings reveal contradictions within neoliberal welfare models, highlighting the costs of devolved, underfunded public/private partnerships. This paper contributes critical insights into the intersection of refugee policy, organizational sociology, and welfare state studies, underscoring the need for systemic reform.
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How, in the wake of the coronavirus crisis, do workers respond to rapid changes in the labor market? This paper mobilizes existing literature on occupational mobility and job loss to develop a theory of situational human capital in which some workers are better positioned to weather occupational transitions than others depending on the alignment between their skill sets, opportunities, and particular contexts. Previous literature looks at this in the case of “pausing,” when workers, often women, take time off from work. Relatively less explored but equally consequential are transitions like “pivoting,” in which workers maneuver within their occupations to adjust their practices or platforms in order to keep working, and “shifting,” in which workers change their occupations altogether. Since most government unemployment benefits focus almost exclusively on workers’ pauses, they neglect to support workers as they pivot and shift during periods of labor market instability and disruption. This paper concludes by offering some policy recommendations to fill this gap.
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In this article, I examine how the intersection of legal status and racialization shapes immigrant’s sense of security; or of legal and interpersonal safety. I draw on an ethnography of Syrian refugees who hold a permanent legal status, and who entered the United States in 2015, as Donald Trump was launching his campaign, amplifying anti-Muslim and anti-refugee sentiment. Following refugee experiences from their arrival, through the issuance of the first executive order banning travel in January 2017, I show how this group, racialized as Muslim and Arab, was categorized as a threat to national security. I also capture the uneven way they came to recognize their racialization. While a permanent legal status is likely a necessary condition for feeling a sense of security in the United States, I argue that it is an insufficient one. I show that Syrian refugees’ racialization attenuated their sense of security despite their legal status.
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In this article, I examine how Syrian refugee men and women shifted their household divisions of labor in their initial years of resettlement in the United States. I combine and extend relational approaches from gender theory and economic sociology to examine how men’s and women’s behaviors shifted, the resources engendered by behavioral shifts, and how they interpreted and compensated for new behaviors and resources. I show that shifts in Syrian household divisions of labor occurred at the intersection of inequalities in social policies, labor markets, and households. As a result of limited social assistance, the refugee families needed to earn an income within months of their arrival. The Syrian men entered the labor market, in keeping with a breadwinning expectation for their labor, but could only access menial jobs that limited their time and opportunity to learn English. Women, meanwhile, did not enter the labor market full-time and could attend English classes. By observing this divergence in men’s and women’s language learning, I theorize human capital as a gendered outcome of household divisions of labor.
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Drawing on data collected from 2008 to 2013 in a low-income Cairo neighborhood, this article examines the impact of a poverty alleviation program, a conditional cash transfer (CCT) that attempted to incentivize poor mothers, through a direct cash transfer, to send their children to school. The program met its goal. The mothers did send their children to school. I argue that only observing this outcome of school access, however, black-boxes the causal pathway of how mothers sent their children to school in the Egyptian context, and how the program mattered. Public schools in Egypt are free on paper but expensive in practice due to an informal system of “private lesson” and “study group” fees imposed by teachers. Mothers had always managed this expense, using scarce gendered household resources, before, during, and after the program. Through ethnographic, interview, and survey data, this article shows that while the cash—transferred to the mothers and labeled for education—enabled the mothers to send their children to school, the program conditions were unnecessary. The mothers did not need to be nudged to send their children to school. This Egyptian case study has implications for the use of behavioral incentives and for the importance of qualitative methods to the study of policy impacts.
For synopsis see: Gowayed, Heba. 2018. “The Problem with Behavioral Incentives” Work in Progress.
(Heba Gowayed, 2013, Ain EsSira, Cairo, Egypt)