CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024

Friday, November 24th 2023, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room F. Goguel (27, St Guillaume)

Displacing Refugees: Resettlement and the Reconstitution of Families
Molly Fee

Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Sociology
Nuffield College, University of Oxford

Sociologists traditionally use integration as the framework for studying the benefits and shortcomings of refugee resettlement, which is considered a durable solution for forced migrants.

This paper problematizes dominant narratives of resettlement as a time of integration and a solution to displacement.

Based on over one thousand hours of ethnographic fieldwork and 102 interviews with refugees and services providers in two U.S. cities, I show how displacement extends through initial resettlement.
By using families as the unit of analysis, this paper demonstrates how the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program reconstitutes kinship structures in three distinct ways,
 1) by prolonging earlier separations caused by forced migration,
 2) by creating new separations that become difficult to rectify, and
 3) by bringing together outdated family units.
Consequently, resettlement engenders social, emotional, and economic consequences that are further disruptive to refugees’ lives.

This paper offers a novel framework for understanding the early stages of a refugee's resettlement. I center refugees’ experiences to make visible all of the tensions caused by this humanitarian program. By focusing on how resettlement reconstitutes refugee families, I contribute to the scholarship on immigrant families and advance sociological understandings of displacement.

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