This thesis is concerned with the extent to which hostility towards asylum seekers/refugees frames advocacy talk. Using a dialogical approach, I analyse how the identities of asylum claimants are dealt with by refugee advocates, in order to counter this hostility. My analysis is based on the collection of publicity materials from four refugee organisations, and from Narrative Biographical Interviews conducted with their staff, volunteers and asylum-seeking clients. Using the notion of dialogical network, I demonstrate how hostility enters advocacy talk, how it frames contemporary advocacy representations of refugees, and how it is challenged. In particular, I use Membership Categorisation Analysis to analyse how members of these organisations, the staff, volunteers and campaigners, maintain or challenge the frames provided by the organizations in their publicity materials. I demonstrate how asylum seekers/refugees themselves deal with the hostility and to what extent they are complicit in maintaining or challenging both hostile and advocacy representations of themselves. Hostility routinely enters the publicity materials and is countered through formulations of refugee identities along the lines of biographical contrasts that work to make the hostility irrelevant. These contrasts are socially resourced, and are organised along a set of 'sympathy themes', whereby asylum seekers are represented as having little choice, as naïve, as victims of violence and as having poor mental health. However, advocates, in their interview talk, push the boundaries of these frames of representation. They present new challenges to established practices of refugee representation, and demonstrate that the moments of antagonism called for in the literature already exist within mainstream advocacy organisations. Similarly, the narratives shared by asylum seeker/refugee informants challenge established representations of refugee-hood, in both mainstream and advocacy practices, providing rich and diverse images of themselves which go beyond representations of 'mute victims'. These cracks, these moments of ethical antagonism, suggest new ways forward for refugee advocacy. Importantly, even within mainstream services, these are live issues for their members. The challenge is to make them visible.

<p>This dissertation gives a number of answers to the following two research questions: given the storied nature of faith and displacement, what does literary studies have to offer church-based refugee activists in religious diasporas? And what might church-based activists, who are involved in daily struggles to interpret cultural, ethnic, and religious stories for the sake of cultural transformation, have to offer literary studies of displacement? The analysis of this thesis uses literary and cultural theory (diaspora studies, postcolonial theorizations of the exotic, discursive analysis, formalist textual examination, and more) to understand interethnic church-based refugee activism taking place within a specific religious diaspora, the Christian Reformed Church in Canada. The formation of diasporas and faith groups through shared allegiances to communal stories makes literary studies a fitting vantage point from which to examine a religious diaspora. Because religious diasporas have explicitly storied identities, their discourses are open to the potential of stories to effect communal change. Refugee novels and other cultural texts that are valued in diaspora and refugee studies can have a part in shaping the storied identity out of which church-based refugee activism is done, helping religious diasporas to more deeply understand the experiences specific to refugee-ed people and to more closely align their activism with the stated desires of refugee-ed people.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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