This thesis studies a by-product of the continuing and complex Arab-Israeli conflict: the Palestinian refugee diaspora in Lebanon, and the efforts of Western charitable organizations with this population. The rise of the non-governmental organization (NGO) movement embroiled the Western world in the Middle East as a new form of intervention, with the aim of providing emergency relief in the short term and plans for development in the long term. This research studies how Palestinians came to live in their host countries with the help of NGOs, and to determine what the challenges and successes of these organizations were. For this study, the American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA) organization is used as a case study by looking at its history of interaction with Palestinians between the War of 1967 and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, a decade and a half marked by war and exodus. Using ANERA’s annual reports, newsletters, board meeting reports, and interviews with individual Palestinians who were raised in Lebanon, the research looks at the history and ethical complications of the international NGO movement. Furthermore, this thesis analyses the logistical challenges and achievements of ANERA in their programming in Lebanon and the way that Palestinians were portrayed by ANERA back to their American public. Finally, the Palestinian perspective is taken into account to understand the impact of Western NGOs on their own community. Ultimately, this study seeks to determine how what has been ANERA’s historical experience with Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.

Rehlet Iraqi was created to depict an Iraqi refugee family’s struggle after fleeing war-torn Iraq. Their struggle is highlighted with hope and high expectations for a better life within the United States. This film emphasizes the toll that emigration has on the life of a family before and after their arrival to Grand Rapids, Michigan.

No description available.

Objective: Refugees experience food challenges upon resettling in their host country. However, there is currently limited Canadian literature that reviews food security among refugees who resettle in Canada. This thesis will assess the barriers and facilitators to food security that influence the dietary changes of refugees who resettle in Hamilton, Ontario, from the perspective of the service providers as well as the refugees. Methods: A qualitative method was applied. Nine individual semi-structured interviews were carried out with service providers in Hamilton. Twelve refugees participated in one of three focus group interviews conducted in the languages of Arabic, Somali, or Spanish. Interviews were transcribed. The data was coded using a qualitative analysis software, NVivo 10. A social ecological model was used to analyse how facilitators and barriers at various levels of influence affect food security among refugees. Levels of influence included: intrapersonal, interpersonal, organizational, community, and public policy. Findings: While several diet-related health concerns were mentioned by refugees, it is difficult to attribute these to diet-related causes since the psychological stress of resettlement was also cited as a causal factor of refugees. While both service providers and refugees agree upon certain facilitators and barriers to food security among refugees at each level of influence in the social ecological model, there were also differences between the two perspectives identified. Different issues were also identified between refugee claimants and government assisted refugees (GARs) who came from refugee camps. Conclusion: The complex relationship between various factors identified at different levels of the social ecological model demonstrate a need for a collaborative, multi-level intervention approach to optimize changes required to improve food security among refugees living in Hamilton. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

Our Hearts and Minds examines how the “figure of the refugee”—as an analytic—both illuminates and complicates conventional understandings of nationhood, citizenship, and belonging, and in doing so, imagines alternative ways to think about history as well as socio-political formations to come. Through analyses of literary and cultural productions, my interdisciplinary project reconceptualizes “refugee” as a condition of subjectivity, as opposed to a legal category, a political anomaly, or a historical experience empty of rights and values. Taking the context of the War in Viet Nam, and the Southeast Asian diasporas that have resulted from it, as my case study, I focus on three affective categories—gratitude, resentment, and resilience—to explore how refugees remember, represent, and embody forced migration and its afterlife. Affect, I suggest, is an important means of turning to the bodies that migrate—its contacts, attachments, intensities, potentialities—as well as the forms of relationality and sociality that enable the refugee’s positioning in the world. Reading a range of texts including novels, short fiction, memoir, poetry, activist performance, and art videos, my research develops a critical framework for understanding refugee passages through the lens of feeling and embodiment, emotion and collectivity. This focus on affect departs from, and challenges, a field of refugee studies that take refugees as “objects of investigation” as well as popular modes of representation that characterize them as pitiful, identity-less mass. I center the textures of subjectivity and embodied experience, suggesting that rather than being restrictive and/or constrictive of diasporic lives, identities, and epistemologies, the refugee designation, or a sense of refugeeness, is valuable in making sense of entangled processes of war, migration, and diaspora. I contend that gratitude, resentment, and resilience are not only inevitable affective structures of American militarism overseas, they also illuminate the conditions of possibility crucial for the work of survival and memory-work in its wake. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Though the world is experiencing unprecedented, persistent crises, there remains little empirical research on teachers working amidst such crises. The small but foundational literature on teachers in crisis contexts within the field of Education in Emergencies has explored the lived experiences of teachers, paying particular attention to how their gender, displacement status, and participation in professional development activities, among other factors, influence teachers’ identities, well-being, and teaching practice. However, this scholarship rarely engages with broader educational literature on teachers, particularly the development of their professional identity, which encompasses teachers’ approaches, actions, and attitudes towards the profession. Further, the teacher literature from stable contexts, mostly in the Global North (e.g., North America, Europe, Oceania), does not engage with research on teachers working amidst conflict, crisis, and displacement. This lack of engagement limits comprehensive understanding of what it means to be a teacher, including how teachers perceive and enact their work—a worrying limitation, given the central role teachers play in implementing quality education. Bridging this divide, this researcher drew on these bodies of literature to explore the roles, responsibilities, and identities of teachers over the course of their lives who live and work amidst protracted conflict, recurrent migration, and forced displacement on both sides of the border in refugee-producing and refugee-receiving communities. This study also extended this scholarship by centering the experiences of teachers as essential actors within education systems as opposed to including them peripherally as key stakeholders within broader educational inquiry. Utilizing ethnographic and narrative methods, the researcher conducted this 5-month qualitative study to examine how protracted conflict, recurrent migration, and forced displacement influence the lived experiences and professional identities of national and refugee primary school teachers in Palabek refugee settlement in northern Uganda and Torit in Eastern Equatoria State in South Sudan. Findings from this study demonstrated teachers’ reluctant pathways to, complex experiences in, and future plans for remaining in or leaving the profession. Further, findings demonstrated an abiding paradox: the glorification of education as a panacea for social malady alongside the devaluing of the central actor in delivering education—the teacher. Thus, the findings not only contribute to theoretical and empirical research on teacher identity and teachers in crisis contexts, but they also encourage practitioners and policymakers to improve support to teachers across stable and crisis contexts alike.

No description available.

The Canadian identity narrative typically centres on two features: universal healthcare and a longstanding tradition of welcoming newcomers – in particular, refugees. In 2012, this mythology was troubled when, without warning, asylum seekers’ healthcare access was dramatically limited. In an equally dramatic fashion, physicians and the greater healthcare community took to the streets, occupied offices, and interrupted politicians in an effort to restore refugee claimants’ access to healthcare. While this physician-led response was unprecedented in Canada, physicians had previously rallied in a similar fashion in two other universal healthcare countries: England (2003) and Germany (1993). Across all three cases, formidable physician responses emerged following efforts to remove or restrict asylum seekers’ healthcare access. In Canada, asylum seeker health restrictions, and the successful social movement they spurred were unexpected entirely. In England, attempts to restrict access are expected, but the government’s failure to implement wide-scale reforms are not. Finally, in Germany, restrictions are potentially expected, but one also expects the decades-long advocacy movement to have created national-level change; instead, ripples of impact are seen unevenly across the country. This prompts two central questions: what conditions are necessary for a national government to successfully implement restrictions on asylum seeker healthcare? And, what conditions will support physician-led social movements’ efforts to reverse these legislative changes? This thesis examines these two questions in a three-case comparison of Canada, England and Germany. Drawing on over 60 qualitative interviews with physicians, policymakers, and politicians, this study takes an ecological approach to understanding what factors facilitate reform, and what factors shape advocacy movements. In particular, this study identifies factors at each of the macro, meso, and micro-levels of analysis to map advocacy movements against their institutional contexts and political climates. By examining social movements as creatures of their policy and ideational contexts, this thesis provides a holistic examination of the people, organizations, and institutions that shape asylum seeker healthcare. This study identifies features of movements and contexts that will impact advocacy efforts; these findings are of use to scholars of social movements but also everyday advocates and persons driving change in asylum seeker social policy. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2014. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The aim of this thesis is to determine what responsibilities democratic states have toward refugees. This problem is stated within the broader framework of the tension inherent in all democratic states: on the one hand, the sovereign right of a state over its territory and, on the other hand, the cosmopolitan or universal human rights norms upon which the state‟s constitution is founded. I argue that this tension is brought to the fore when refugees cross borders and enter into democratic territories, asking for protection and claiming their human rights. The sheer magnitude of the refugee crisis makes this an issue every state should address. My answer to the question of state responsibility is worked out in four phases. Firstly, I give a conceptual clarification of refugeehood, sovereignty, and cosmopolitanism. I show that neither absolute sovereignty (which implies closed borders) nor extreme cosmopolitanism (which implies no borders) is desirable. Secondly, I draw on Immanuel Kant‟s cosmopolitan theory as a possible solution. Kant proposes a world-federation of states in which right is realised on the civic, international, and cosmopolitan level. Kant also insists that every individual has the right to hospitality – a right which foreign states should recognise. Thirdly, I examine three prominent theories which could offer us a way to address the refugee crisis. I argue that the first two – multiculturalism and John Rawls‟ „law of peoples‟ – are not adequate responses to the refugee crisis, but that the third – Seyla Benhabib‟s cosmopolitan federalism – is more promising. Hospitality is the first responsibility states have toward refugees, and Benhabib proposes that it be institutionalised by (i) forming a federation of states founded on cosmopolitan principles, (ii) revising membership norms through the political process of democratic iterations, and (iii) extending some form of political membership to the state to refugees. Lastly, I justify the claim that political membership should be extended by referring to Hannah Arendt‟s argument that the ability to speak and act publicly is part of what it means to be human. If we deny refugees this ability, or if we deny them access to political processes, we deny their humanity. Benhabib proposes institutional measures to ensure that this does not happen, including allowing for political membership on sub-national, national, and supranational levels. Ultimately, I argue that democratic states have the responsibility to (i) allow entry to refugees, (ii) give refugees legal status and offer protection, and (ii) extend political membership to them on some level. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die doel van hierdie tesis is om te bepaal wat die verantwoordelikhede van demokratiese state teenoor vlugtelinge is. Ek plaas hierdie probleem binne die breër raamwerk van die onderliggende spanning in demokratiese state: die soewereine reg van ‟n staat oor sy grondgebied, aan die een kant, en die kosmopolitiese of universele menseregte-norme waarop die staat se grondwet berus, aan die ander kant. Ek argumenteer dat hierdie spanning na vore gebring word wanneer vlugtelinge, op soek na beskerming, grense oorsteek, demokratiese state binnetree en aanspraak maak op hulle regte. Ek bespreek die vraagstuk in vier stappe. Eerstens verduidelik ek die begrippe van vlugtelingskap, soewereiniteit en kosmopolitisme. Ek toon aan dat nóg absolute soewereiniteit (wat geslote grense impliseer), nóg ekstreme kosmopolitisme (wat geen grense impliseer) ‟n wenslike ideaal is. Tweedens kyk ek na Immanuel Kant se kosmopolitiese teorie vir ‟n moontlike oplossing. Kant stel voor dat state saamkom in ‟n wêreld-federasie, om sodoende reg te laat geskied op die plaaslike, internasionale, en kosmopolitiese vlak. Kant dring ook aan daarop dat elke individu die reg tot gasvryheid besit, ‟n reg wat ook deur ander state buiten die individu se staat van herkoms erken behoort te word. Derdens ondersoek ek drie prominente teorieë wat moontlike oplossings bied vir die vlugteling-krisis. Ek argumenteer dat die eerste twee – multikulturalisme en John Rawls se „law of peoples‟ – nie voldoende is om die vlugteling-krisis die hoof te bied nie. Die derde teorie, Seyla Benhabib se kosmopolitiese federalisme, blyk meer belowend te wees. Benhabib stel voor dat die staat se verantwoordelikheid om gasvryheid te toon geïnstitusionaliseer kan word deur (i)‟n federasie van state gegrond op kosmopolitiese beginsels te vorm, (ii) lidmaatskap-norme te hersien deur ‟n politieke proses genaamd demokratiese iterasie, en (iii) politieke lidmaatskap van een of ander aard aan vlugtelinge toe te ken. Laastens regverdig ek die aanspraak op lidmaatskap. Ek verwys na Hannah Arendt se argument dat die vermoë om in die publieke sfeer te praat en dade te kan uitvoer, deel uitmaak van wat dit beteken om ‟n mens te wees. As ons verhoed dat vlugtelinge hierdie twee vermoëns kan uitleef, ontken ons hulle menslikheid. Benhabib stel sekere institutionele maatreëls voor om dit te voorkom. Dit sluit politieke lidmaatskap op ‟n sub-nasionale, nasionale, en supra-nasionale vlak in. Uiteindelik argumenteer ek dat demokratiese state se verantwoordelikhede teenoor vlugtelinge uit die volgende bestaan: (i) toegang tot hierdie state se grondgebied, (ii) wetlike status en beskerming, en (iii) politieke lidmaatskap op een of ander vlak.