Search results

This paper aims to present a critical appraisal of Ghassan Kanafani’s short story “The Child Goes to the Camp” using the Appraisal Theory proposed by Martin and Rose (2007) in an attempt to investigate the predicament of the Palestinians who were forced to flee their country and live in refugee camps as well as the various effects refugee life had on them.

Using the Appraisal Theory, and with a special focus on the categories of Attitude and Graduation, the paper aims to shed light on the plight of refugees through revealing the narrator’s suffering in a refugee camp where the most important virtue becomes remaining alive.

Analysing the story using the Appraisal Theory reveals the impact refugee life has left on the narrator and his family. This story serves as a warning for the world of the suffering refugees have to endure when they are forced to flee their war-torn countries.

Although Kanafani’ resistance literature has been studied extensively, his short stories have not received much scholarly attention. In addition, his works have not been subject to linguistic analysis. This study presents an appraisal analysis of Kanafani’s “The Child Goes to the Camp” in an attempt to investigate how the author’s linguistic choices are key to highlighting the suffering of the Palestinians, especially children, in refugee camps.

Many refugees around the world are forced to leave their counties seeking safety and security. Millions of Syrian refugees fled their country since the conflict started in Syria. Jordan is one of the host countries for refugees from different countries including Syria. Health-related quality of life of individuals influences both the individual and the community, and how these two interact with one another. This study aims to explore the four domains – physical health, psychological health, social relationships and environment domains – of health-related quality of life of adults residing in Za’atari camp in the North of Jordan.

A constructivist grounded theory approach was used. Data were collected using semi-structured, face-to-face, audio-recorded interviews. Data were analysed using different levels of coding, constant comparative analysis and writing reflective memos.

Pursuing safety and security emerged as a core theme in this study. Participants were pursuing safety and security since the conflict started in Syria. Lack of safety and security led them to flee Syria. For participants, safety and security were among the most important aspects of their lives. The meaning of safety and security for Syrian refugees is presented in this paper.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study exploring the health-related quality of life of Syrian refugees residing in Za’atari camp using a qualitative approach.

This chapter discusses ethics in participatory photography with focus on refugee participants and informal refugee camp setting. The chapter draws on ethics in participatory photography projects elsewhere and especially the experiences of photographers who work with these methods. The context here is the Calais Jungle camp, where the authors worked with a group of participants, who were residents of the camp, over several months to encourage photographing and documenting life in the camp and beyond, and to work on life stories that can be drawn from and inspired by these photos. The project, and hence the ethics in our work, were framed by the experiences of the refugee participants, and so at all times the authors needed to navigate temporality, violence, state oppression, lack of resources, human rights violations, language barriers, religious and cultural differences, national and supranational immigration policies, shame, and more. This chapter discusses how the authors navigated these ethical issues, the limitations of the approaches and solutions they found, and the lessons they learned, which can be applied to research using participatory visual methods with refugees.

Social capital is an essential determinant of health that contributes significantly to quality of life. Social capital has potential of improving the health and well-being of refugees. Refugees in Zimbabwe are confined to an isolation camp making social networks a necessity for survival and psychosocial support. The purpose of this paper is to identify if social capital has effects on wellness and well-being (quality of life) of individuals in a confined setting such as a refugee camp.

A cross-sectional study was conducted at Tongogara Refugee Camp, Zimbabwe. The World Bank Integrated Questionnaire on Social Capital was adjusted to develop data collection tools. The parameters of social capital, economic, social and cultural capital, were used as the framework of study.

A total of 164 respondents were interviewed (62.8 percent females). A total of 98 percent were affiliated to a religious group and 30 percent of the interviewees stated that at least one member of their household was on social media. Only 18 percent communicated with people in their home country and 75 percent used social media to create new links.

The various opportunities for psychosocial support that exist within refugee populations can be used to formulate interventions aimed at improving health and quality of life of refugees.

This paper offers insight into the effects of social capital on refugee health and quality of life among refugees in Zimbabwe.

This review and theoretical analysis paper aims to bring together literatures of place, mobility, refugees and mental health to problematise the ways in which social support is practised on the ground and to rethink its possibilities.

This paper draws on an interdisciplinary understanding of social support that focusses on the social networks and significant and intimate relationships that mitigate negative mental health and well-being outcomes. The authors explore the dialectic relationship between place and mobility in refugee experiences of social support.

The authors argue that, in an Euro-American context, practices of social support have historically been predicated on the idea of people-in-place. The figure of the refugee challenges the notion of a settled person in need of support and suggests that people are both in place and in motion at the same time. Conversely, attending to refugees’ biographies, lived experiences and everyday lives suggests that places and encounters of social support are varied and go beyond institutional spaces.

The authors explore this dialectic of personhood as both in place and in motion and its implications for the theorisation, research and design of systems of social support for refugees.

This paper surfaces the dialectics of place and mobility for supporting refugee mental health from an interdisciplinary perspective.

A burgeoning stream of tourism and hospitality research highlights the role of entrepreneurship in bringing about positive social and economic outcomes for both refugees themselves and their host countries. Yet little has been done so far both in mainstream entrepreneurship research and tourism scholarship to explore how motivations influence perceived entrepreneurial success of refugees and how this eventually affects their subjective well-being. To address this gap, the present study aims to propose and empirically test a conceptual model postulating relationships between contextual and individual entrepreneurial motives, perceptions of entrepreneurial success and life satisfaction.

This study draws on quantitative data collected through 172 surveys of refugee entrepreneurs venturing in different subsectors within tourism and hospitality in Turkey and the UK. A structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test the proposed theoretical model.

The results reveal that contextual and individual entrepreneurial motives have a significant positive impact on perceived entrepreneurial success. As predicted, perceived entrepreneurial success is found to have a significant positive impact on life satisfaction. A multigroup analysis involving host country (Turkey vs the UK) and mode of entry (founder vs takeover) indicates no significant difference based on host country, whereas the strength of relationships for takeovers is relatively greater as compared to founders.

This study advocates that the reductionist approach viewing refugees as temporary “outsiders” who are in consistent need of public provision, and welfare services should not prevail against their ability to achieve self-efficiency through entrepreneurship. Hence, policies need to be oriented toward supporting refugee entrepreneurial activities over various business stages and modes of entry. More importantly, ensuring high success rates among refugee entrepreneurs should be viewed as a pivotal tool to address the well-being of refugees, their families and their fellows.

While previous research identifies drivers of entrepreneurship success and the potential favorable outcomes, none of these studies empirically models refugee entrepreneurship motives, self-reported entrepreneurial success and life satisfaction as a distinct and growing cohort of entrepreneurs. This study makes significant theoretical contributions to the corpus of literature on the social outcomes of entrepreneurship and provides timely implications for policymakers to use entrepreneurship as a market-based solution to address refugees’ subjective well-being.

The civil war prompted many Tamils to flee Sri Lanka as refugees. Several researchers have documented psychological distress and trauma among Sri Lankan Tamil refugees, but the literature lacks sufficient discussion of resilience among this population. Although Sri Lankan Tamil refugees have experienced conflict and loss, they have also demonstrated positive adaptation following these challenges. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The present study used an ecological approach, in which the effect of the environment on a person is regarded as significant, to explore resilience among Sri Lankan Tamils living in refugee camps in India.

Through a qualitative investigation of refugee experiences of war and camp life, the authors developed a conceptual framework for understanding individual and collective resilience among refugees.

Additionally, the results of this study need to be interpreted with caution because participants were camp refugees, which may limit the applicability of these results with refugees who live in different settings.

The current research results show that intervention programs should have multiple components, including trauma intervention to address the individual and community psychological and psychiatric effects of war and migration experiences and psychosocial interventions to address individual, family, community dynamics and daily stressors.

The study participants stated that Sri Lankan Tamil refugees are using their resilience traits including will power, positive talk, practical solutions, social support, religion and social networks to remake their broken souls.

Future studies need to be conducted with other refugee group to validate the findings of the paper.

Transnational shifts experienced by Syrian refugee young adults disrupt their lives. Many start their journey as children, transition into adolescents often in countries of asylum, and resettle as young adults in countries such as Canada with the dream to rebuild their lives. Too old (+16) for the traditional school cycle, they are encouraged into adult education (AE) as their only choice to complete their high school diplomas to obtain minimum wage jobs or continue to higher education. Their progress through AE continues their destabilization, particularly in terms of their aspirations, hopes and dreams. The authors focus on the educational journeys of this population who have largely been forgotten by policies and programs for refugee integration. Drawing upon 29 interviews with Syrian refugee young adults in Quebec, using a theoretical framework of migration/aspirations and critical race theory, the authors highlight how disruption is perpetuated in their education after their arrival rather than stability.

This paper examines how entrepreneurship focused programs build capacities for disadvantaged groups to pursue more dignified lives. The struggles of disadvantaged entrepreneurs against pronounced structural constraints are well documented, but less is known about how targeted programs of entrepreneurship focused support change the status quo for disadvantaged communities.

The paper is grounded in a mainly inductive, interpretive study and explores the work of an entrepreneurship focused program targeted at refugee participants. The paper reports on intensive fieldwork and in-depth interviews with 23 program participants in London, UK.

The empirical sections elaborate three key mechanisms supporting greater self-determination and better opportunities: building entrepreneurial intention, building contextual legitimacy and building proximal ties. These mechanisms empower disadvantaged groups to pursue a wide variety of meaningful goals, including but not limited to starting a business.

This paper draws attention to problems of over-emphasizing the disadvantaged entrepreneurs' agency. It uses the vocabulary of self-determination theory (SDT) and offers a psychosocial perspective of the consequences of disadvantage and the potential for entrepreneurship focused programs to build key capacities and improve precarious lives.

There is substantial research on the experiences, needs and well-being of unaccompanied refugee adolescents, but less is known about existential aspects of their lives. The purpose of the current study is to explore existential meaning-making among unaccompanied refugee children.

The informants in this study are young unaccompanied refugees (n = 30) living in Norway, and young Norwegians (n = 46). The authors undertook a secondary analysis of in-depth qualitative refugee interview data and a quantitative analysis of questionnaire data from Norwegian informants.

Both the refugee youths and the Norwegian youths expressed that social relationships and connections to others were most important for meaning. Moreover, both groups emphasized the importance of relatedness and generativity, i. e. commitment to worldly affairs beyond one’s immediate needs. The main differences between the two groups were related to the significance attached to religion and to loneliness.

The comparison between the two groups is only possible to some degree. Secondary analyses have some limitations, as well as strengths.

The findings may be useful for supporting young refugees, as they provide insights into less-studied aspects of their lives.

The originality of this study lies in the focus on and broad interpretation of meaning, of secondary data analyses, and of comparisons between youths that are refugees versus non-refugees.