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Putting Down Roots: A Case Study of the Participation of Somali Bantu Refugees in the Global Gardens Refugee Farming Project in Boise, Idaho

ix, 86 p. / Using interviews with refugee farmers and insights gained through participant-observation at farms and at farming events, this thesis explores how Somali Bantu refugees interact with the Global Gardens resettlement project in Boise, Idaho. Somali Bantu refugees' engagement with the agricultural integration program reveals that the United States refugee resettlement system often focuses on economic integration goals and measures to the exclusion of alternative development or integration options. Refugee farmers' common and differing experiences and evaluations of the farm project challenge the wisdom of a purely neoliberal, economics-focused approach to resettlement. This study suggests that refugee-farming participants were not uniformly and principally motivated to farm by potential financial gain: in addition to viewing the farms as an economic resource, participants valued the farms as important social, cultural, and civic resources. / Committee in charge: Stephen Wooten, Chairperson;
Lynn Fujiwara, Member;
Dennis Galvan, Member

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:uoregon.edu/oai:scholarsbank.uoregon.edu:1794/11496
Date06 1900
CreatorsSmith, Emily Rene, 1981-
PublisherUniversity of Oregon
Source SetsUniversity of Oregon
Languageen_US
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis
RelationUniversity of Oregon theses, Dept. of International Studies, M.A., 2011;

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