Newcomer women in Canada often encounter gendered resettlement barriers, including social isolation, caregiving demands, and limited access to culturally inclusive recreation, which can negatively affect wellbeing and belonging. This community-engaged study explored how physical activity (PA) can shape newcomer women’s sense of belonging during resettlement. Using reflexive thematic analysis, we analyzed semistructured interviews with 10 newcomer women. We found that PA fostered social connection, confidence, emotional well-being, and community participation, while cost, transportation, and caregiving constrained engagement. PA functioned as both a health behaviour and a pathway to belonging. Settlement services should provide accessible, culturally responsive, gender-sensitive PA opportunities.
This article examines the widely used but false claim that the word Kakuma, which is the site of a large refugee camp, means “nowhere” in Swahili. It traces the origin and spread of this false translation and how Kakuma has in fact long been “somewhere” for the Turkana people. “Nowhere” makes sense only by comparing Kakuma to “somewhere,” which in turn draws on long-standing hierarchies of traditional/modern or underdeveloped/developed. Thus, through the “nowhere” narrative, the region and Turkana people are consigned to pre-modernity. This study argues for a better understanding of from where narratives by and about refugees and host communities emerge, why they come to be accepted, and the impacts they might have.
This qualitative study explores the experiences of forcibly displaced families and their strategies for protecting and transporting identity, health, and education records during migration. Ninety in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with parent–child dyads who had been displaced from Afghanistan, Syria, and Ukraine and currently residing in Türkiye, Poland, and Canada. Findings revealed that documents not only served legal and practical purposes but also symbolized memory, safety, and familial continuity. Mothers emerged as the primary guardians of official records. The study highlights the urgent need for accessible, secure, and inter-operable document storage systems that reflect the lived realities of displaced families.
This article explores how Norwegian resettlement officers navigate moral dilemmas when selecting refugees who are deemed both deserving of protection and too vulnerable, costly, or risky to resettle. It analyzes resettlement officers’ moral distress, discretionary power, and coping strategies and develops a moral economy perspective on refugee resettlement in a universalist welfare state. The analysis reveals that these dilemmas reflect fundamental contradictions within the resettlement system, at the intersection of humanitarian commitment, national legal and social norms, and municipal capacity. These moral tensions create a space where human suffering is neither ignored nor easily resolved but continuously present.
This article demonstrates how refugee integration is supported in rural and small communities across Canada. We conducted virtual focus groups and interviews with 40 participants across the country who support refugees through settlement organizations, sponsorship groups, and other networks. The article outlines six participant-identified models of settlement services and explores the benefits, challenges, and limitations of, and potential improvements for, each model. These models highlight the mix of formal and informal supports existing in rural places and the urban focus of Canada's settlement syste adequate funding of settlement services in smaller communities and engaging with rural service providers. m. Recommendations include
There has been a shift toward resettlement in smaller cities, creating potential new challenges, and opportunities, in supporting refugee families. This study used interviews and participant observation to explore health and social impacts of a settlement services–run arts-based therapy group for newcomer families in a small city. A social-ecological approach exploring how the program operated as a third space highlighted potential pathways for supporting newcomer families’ well-being across multiple levels. As a study exploring the intersection of refugee settlement, organizational programming, and well-being, this article contributes to a greater understanding of newcomer supports within a smaller city context.
This study traces how vulnerability emerged as a key concept in Norwegian refugee policy from the 1980s to the 2020s. Using Koselleck’s conceptual history framework, it analyzes seven major legislative and policy debates. The findings show a shift from systemic understandings of displacement to individualized assessments of risk, reinforcing hierarchies of deservingness. Vulnerability liberalized asylum procedures but also legitimized restrictive policies, favouring resettled refugees over asylum seekers. The study highlights how this concept operates as both a moral and a political tool, shaping refugee priorities while narrowing political responsibility for global displacement.
This study introduces medicolegal alienation, a novel form of legal consciousness illuminating physicians’ lived experience of law in engaging in caring for undocumented patients in the context of medical humanitarianism in a welfare state. Empirically grounded findings depict a shifting terrain of medical praxis under restrictive migration regimes and neoliberal health care reforms, illustrating how, by venturing away from the sanctioned territories of conventional medicine, insight into the plight of those confined between legal realms becomes heavily ambiguous. The physician finds themselves liminal by proxy, isolated, marginalized, and overwhelmed by medicolegal alienation as they navigate disrupted care on the thresholds of society.
While forensic medical evaluations (FMEs) have been shown to bolster rates of asylum approval in the United States, a discourse analysis of deidentified FMEs reveals a more nuanced function. In the suspicious and disbelieving culture of asylum adjudication, the rhetorical strategies and devices along with mandated neutral language in FMEs can inadvertently marginalize, reproduce suspicion of, and introduce (un)certainty about applicant testimony. Thus, FMEs can be co-opted to become a technology of state control over asylum seeker’s lives by allowing adjudicators to utilize them as flexible justification to support arbitrary asylum decisions under the guise of medical evidence.
This article explores vulnerability in the resettlement experiences and imaginaries of Syrian refugee youth (aged 18–35) in Türkiye, a group often excluded from conventional vulnerability frameworks. Based on in-depth interviews, it conceptualizes vulnerability as multi-faceted, spanning innate, structural, and situational dimensions. Findings show how shifting migration policies, politicization, and institutional barriers compound insecurities, shaping how youth imagine and pursue resettlement in a protracted refugee context. The study contributes to debates on vulnerability, youth migration, and the evolving possibilities of resettlement, and underlines the need for international policies and agreements that adopt context-sensitive approaches addressing structural and situational factors.
This longitudinal study examines trust in institutions among young refugees in Germany. Due to the scarcity of data, an initial exploratory approach was applied and the extent of trust in institutions is described; this is followed by a description of influencing factors on trust in institutions and developments over time. The central finding is that institutional trust initially is relatively high but erodes over time. A time-invariant positive effect at both measurement points is a sense of belonging to Germany. While in the earlier stages of arrival, perceptions of being in control is vital, later questions of purpose in life gain importance.
Despite extensive migration research, the resettlement experiences of adolescent girls and young women with refugee backgrounds remain underexplored. This research, grounded in girlhood studies and participatory visual and arts-based methodology, engaged nine participants (ages 14–24) from Haiti, Venezuela, Congo, and Brazil in the province of Quebec, Canada. Through photovoice, participants documented their experiences, highlighting key challenges such as discrimination, mental health struggles, financial insecurity, and educational barriers. While they reported feeling physically safe, systemic barriers continued to hinder their full integration. Findings emphasize the need for targeted support and programs to foster meaningful inclusion and long-term well-being.
In 2022, Sweden introduced new refugee selection guidelines prioritizing women and girls—a departure from earlier practices focused solely on vulnerability. Through a problem representation analysis, this article examines parliamentary motions on resettlement from 2015 to 2022, exploring how gender, im/mobility, religion, and vulnerability shape notions of deservingness. It argues that gender is—intentionally or not—used as a governance tool, reflecting a broader migration policy shift of not only framing men and asylum seekers as a problem but creating the grounds for weakening rights-based approaches in favour of a more humanitarian approach to migration governance driven by compassion but also control.
Refugee “women at risk” (WaR) have been prioritized since the late 1980s as candidates for third-country resettlement. Drawing on Macklin (1995), this article interrogates the logic and consequences of the WaR category. Through the lens of Norwegian practice, it shows how restrictive interpretations of UNHCR’s criteria and securitized resettlement processes reinforce a culture of disbelief and a focus on non-state protection by men. The application of WaR incentivizes family separation and perpetuates essentialist ideas about women’s vulnerabilities. While a broader category for gender-based risks can moderate WaR’s exclusionary effects, it similarly contributes to legitimizing harmful border regimes.
La connaissance de la langue en usage dans la communauté de réinstallation est déterminante pour l'intégration des nouveaux arrivants. À partir d’une approche fondée sur le milieu et le cadre théorique de Chiswick et Miller (2001), nous examinons comment le milieu de la communauté de réinstallation peut faciliter ou limiter l’acquisition de la langue en étudiant le cas des personnes réfugiées syriennes à Gatineau, une ville québécoise de taille moyenne à la frontière de l’Ontario. Nous trouvons que le contexte de Gatineau a joué un rôle significatif et complexe dans l'exposition des personnes réfugiées syriennes au français et dans leurs capacités et incitatifs à l’apprendre. Notre analyse prolonge les travaux de Chiswick et Miller (2001) en intégrant une lecture située du processus de francisation, ancrée dans des dynamiques locales, ce qui permet de mieux comprendre les variations de l’apprentissage du français d’un milieu à l’autre chez les nouveaux arrivants au Québec.
