Fischer, Carolin; Insberg, Manuel (29 June 2022). The questionable Safe Haven: Restraints and concessions in refugees’ experiences of safety and healing (Unpublished). In: 19th IMISCOE Annual Conference.
‘We wanted to rebuild our lives, that was all’. This statement appears in Hannah Arendt’s polemic essay We refugees, written in 1943. It expresses a fundamental expectation that is connected to asylum, the protection of refugees through a host country. As a legal and everyday condition, asylum not only means safety from persecution but also the desire a of possibility to build a new life as part of which refugees can recover from suffering, persecution and violence.
Contemporary national and global trends in refugee governance, however, not only revolve around protection and recovery. In welfare state regimes across Europe, for example, asylum is tied to so-called integration requirements. These requirements often have profound, ambiguous and constraining impacts on individuals’ everyday lives and on their aspirations and opportunities for the future. Simultaneously, social bonds and – often traumatic – memories continue shaping the lives of refugees after arrival. Acknowledging such entanglements of past and present experiences and (trans)national asylum politics, we shed new conceptual and empirical light on the limitations of asylum as a safe haven.
Our paper draws on ethnographic data from ongoing research on refugee arrival and settlement in Norway and Switzerland. It explores how persons who have been granted long-term legal protection conceptualize recovery through notions like “safety”, “healing” or “rebirth” and how these notions are related to everyday practice. Based on our ethnographic inquiries, we uncover emic conceptions of safety and protection and discuss related possibilities for and restrictions to a new phase of life in safety.
Item Type: |
Conference or Workshop Item (Speech) |
|---|---|
Division/Institute: |
06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Art and Cultural Studies > Institute of Social Anthropology |
UniBE Contributor: |
Fischer, Carolin (A), Insberg, Manuel |
Subjects: |
300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology |
Language: |
English |
Submitter: |
Manuel Insberg |
Date Deposited: |
06 Dec 2022 13:59 |
Last Modified: |
29 Mar 2023 23:38 |
URI: |
https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/174965 |
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