Archetypes of Escape #4: “I would like to reunite with my family”
Includes hoping to reunite with children and parents who have already made the journey to Europe or the US.
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Archetypes of Escape #3: “I want my family to thrive”
Includes: leaning toward improved business opportunities; career advancement; educational opportunities
Read moreArchetypes of Escape #1: “I was in extreme danger where I was (or my family was)”
Includes: political, ethnic and religious violence; threat of conscription; household conflict; violence from land disputes and other violence; violence from
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“Worth the 500-Mile Walk”
A young Syrian professional’s journey to “the-country-North-of-Turkey” that he wants to explore. Here he sets off through the wilds for
Read moreAhmed’s Journey from Syria to Turkey via Lebanon and Egypt
A family man zig-zags across income streams, kinship ties, banks and modes of money transfer.
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Financial Journey of Refugees in the Mediterranean
What can money reveal about the experience of migration? This video, created by Charlie Bentley, highlights the groundbreaking research of Kim Wilson and Roxani Krystalli, using finance as a lens to understand migration journeys throughout the Mediterranean.
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“I’m the Everything”: The Overlooked Heroism of Refugee Youth in the United States
By Julie Zollmann. Nine voluntary agencies have the official responsibility for resettling refugees into communities throughout the United States. They find their clients new housing, schools, and jobs. They help them get social security numbers and open bank accounts. They play an indispensable role in helping refugees settle into their new homes. But the work of integration, of truly building a life in a new country with a new language, new transportation system, new labor market, and a whole new set of social norms is a much bigger job, one that in many families is being done stoically, even heroically, by young refugees in their teens and early twenties.
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Financial Integration of Refugees in Dallas, Texas
By Julie Zollmann, Airokhsh Faiz-Qaisary, Kenza Ben-Azouz, Kim Wilson, and Radha Rajkotia. Refugees resettled in the United States are typically supported quite closely early in their transition as support agencies help them settle into new homes, open bank accounts, get their first jobs, and register their children in school. Agencies monitor whether refugees are “self-sufficient,” meaning that their incomes cover their most essential expenses as quickly as possible. However, little is known about the next stage of refugees’ financial and economic transitions, once refugees are no longer interacting regularly with resettlement agencies. In July 2018, we interviewed 29 refugees who had been resettled two to three years earlier to understand the phases of their financial transition and identify possible opportunities to accelerate refugees’ financial gains.
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‘I followed the flood’: A Gender Analysis of the Moral and Financial Economies of Forced Migration
An article by Roxanne Krystalli, Allyson Hawkins, and Kim Wilson, published in “Disasters.” What would a gender analysis of refugee crises reveal if one expanded the focus beyond female refugees, and acts of physical violence? This paper draws on qualitative research conducted in Denmark, Greece, Jordan, and Turkey in July and August 2016 to spotlight the gendered kinship, hierarchies, networks, and transactions that affect refugees. The coping strategies of groups often overlooked in the gender conversation are examined throughout this study, including those of male refugees and those making crossings outside of the context of a family unit. The analysis is theoretically situated at the intersection of critical humanitarianism and the politics of vulnerability, and rooted in debates about the feminisation of refugees and corresponding protection agendas. A key contribution of this work is the ethnographic tracing of how refugees embody these politics along their journeys.
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