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“This is what you want! This is what you signed up for!”: How Agencies Responsibilize Resettling Refugees
| Content Provider | Paperity |
|---|---|
| Author | Wilber, Kelsey |
| Abstract | US refugee resettlement agencies face a daunting task: they are federally mandated to achieve resettlement within a severely restricted time frame and funding limit per refugee, all while creating integrated, “self-sufficient� US citizens. As a result, resettlement agencies must guide resettling refugees through a rigidly scheduled set of activities that are designed to expunge ‘dependency’ while finding resettling refugees jobs, homes, schools, and community belonging. Interviewing resettlement case workers and volunteers in a northwestern US city, I find that staff respond to this double bind by using informal tactics to transform the character of resettled refugees into good neoliberal ‘American’ subjects, such that economic self-sufficiency becomes a ‘sign’ of worthiness for US citizenship. Staff and volunteers responsibilize resettling refugees by redefining economic self-sufficiency as a mode of self-care and by encouraging refugees to adopt a strictly short-term cost-benefit rationality. These governmentalized tactics obscure the precarious positions of many resettling refugees and instead implement a new configuration of ‘barely making it,’ which is hidden by the invisible, unpaid labor of volunteers and caseworkers as they try to sustain refugees who have far too few resources. |
| File Format | HTM / HTML |
| Issue Number | 1 |
| Journal | McNair Scholars Research Journal |
| Volume Number | 14 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Boise State University |
| Publisher Date | 2019-07-24 |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
