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Social and Public Policy
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Telling the stories of young refugees in a range of international urban settings, this book explores how newcomers navigate urban spaces and negotiate multiple injustices in their everyday lives.
This innovative edited volume is based on in-depth, qualitative research with young refugees and their perspectives on migration, social relations, and cultural spaces. The chapters give voice to refugee youth from a wide variety of social backgrounds, including insights about their migration experiences, their negotiations of spatial justice and injustice, and the diverse ways in which they use urban space.
In the concluding chapter, we reflect on the everyday experiences of young refugees and asylum-seekers in public spaces and how they are shaped by dominant political discourses in the host society, while also being expressions of (micro-)political claims to belonging and the right to the city. The complexity of political issues and the hostile political contexts in which refugee youth often find themselves is a key issue for ongoing research in this field. So too are the creative and engaging ways in which young refugees engage in, resist, challenge and rework political issues in different spaces and times. Such analyses also include reflections on what constitutes the publicness of public spaces and the role played therein of visibility.
For over 60 years the Tibetan refugee diaspora are still residing in ‘temporary’ largely refugee settlements in India. Whereas older Tibetans often still feel a strong attachment towards their homeland, among the younger refugees, who were born in India or moved there at a young age, a more ambiguous and ambivalent sense of belonging is emerging. We examine their sense of belonging through four main topics, namely receiving society receptivity, social capital, economic integration and exposure to the host society. Thirty-nine in-depth interviews were conducted with refugees in the Bylakuppe settlement, and participant observation and photography also supplemented the interviews. The findings of this study indicate that young Tibetans are developing a sense of belonging towards Tibet, India and the West simultaneously – thereby arguing for a more temporal and comprehensive understanding of belonging.
Participatory theatre, in a wide body of works, is discussed as an artistic format that allows marginalised subjects to articulate their voices and enact citizenship – especially in the context of migration and race. In this contribution, I will critically engage with these perspectives and investigate the ambiguities and ambivalences that come along with story-based theatre projects, particularly when involving young refugees and asylum seekers. Based on three months of fieldwork in a community theatre project in Leipzig (Germany), I will take a closer look at moments of silence, rupture and withdrawal and reflect on (dis)articulation as enactment of citizenship. This work is embedded in the Humanities European Research Area research project ‘The everyday experiences of young refugees and asylum seekers in public space’ (2019–2022).
In the year 2018, Brazil began to face its own migration crisis. Despite already receiving refugees from different countries, in recent years the situation became worrying when a large number of Venezuelans began to cross the border. The enrolment of foreign students in the country has doubled in recent years and most of them are concentrated in the public network. Considering this context, the aim of this chapter is to analyse the mechanisms enabling the reception of Venezuelan refugee youth in the school context. This represents a major challenge for Brazilian public education since there is no unity in Brazil in terms of law that indicates how to work with refugee youth in school. For our observations in the school context we use the methodological guidelines for ethnographic work in this context of Medvedovski and colleagues (2015) and Rockwell (2009)
Experiences within public spaces can influence the belonging of refugee youth communities. For those from these communities who are ‘visibly different’ from socially and politically constructed identity norms, this can disrupt their overall sense of belonging resulting in marginalisation within public spaces. Experiences within public spaces has become a pertinent issue for Australian Sudanese and South Sudanese youth at a time when their identities have been politicised within media and politics, situating these youth as dangerous ‘outsiders’. Utilising a voice-centred relational methodology approach, this chapter presents and discusses Australian Sudanese and South Sudanese youths’ perspectives on their experiences in public spaces in the city of Melbourne. Findings suggest that these young people’s experiences within public spaces are influenced by the consequences of negative racialised public and political discourses, whereby these youth feel they are under control and surveillance in public spaces relative to a sense of visible difference.
This chapter examines the regional impact of the COVID-19 economic crisis. Through analysing ONS data it examines regional trends in furlough rates, unemployment rates, and wage levels. The chapter shows that the negative economic impacts of the pandemic were higher in the North. Productivity costs to the UK economy from higher COVID-19 mortality (Chapter Two), mental health morbidity (Chapter Three) are calculated and it is found that the North was disproportionately affected. The chapter also explores the differing levels of COVID-19 restrictions and finds harsher lockdown restrictions were experienced in the North.
Why and how do policymakers initially sceptical of policy innovations from abroad eventually transfer them to their own countries? Focusing on Chile’s reforms to combat business cartels in 2009 and 2016, this article answers that question. Policy diffusion and transfer literatures maintain that coercion, competition, learning or emulation could account for foreign inspirations in policymaking. However, these literatures overplay the role of coercion and emulation in policy transfer to countries in the global south, and have difficulty distinguishing between different mechanisms in empirical studies. To address these limitations, I suggest analysing three intermediate causal steps in policy transfer: first, policymakers’ motivations in initiating policy reforms, second, their reflections on how the foreign-inspired model responds to the policy problem at hand, and third, their reflections on the fit between the foreign model and domestic conditions. Through process-tracing of two anti-cartel reforms in Chile, I find that policymakers introduced foreign-inspired policy measures to combat business cartels through a process of learning from other countries and international organisations, rather than coercion or emulation. Learning was evident in three ways. First, in the initiation of the reform, as policymakers responded to a clearly identified policy problem; second, in policymakers’ careful reflection on how the foreign-inspired model responded to these problems; and third, in the adjustments made to fit the foreign model to domestic conditions. The analysis demonstrates the utility of analysing intermediate causal steps in policy transfer, and of paying more attention to local actors and political processes.
This chapter concludes by reflecting on what can be done to reduce health inequalities. Drawing on international case studies of when inequalities in health have been reduced, this chapter outlines what public policy response is needed now to reduce regional health inequalities so that they do not increase for future generations and in any future pandemics.
This chapter describes the pre-pandemic context of inequalities in health and wealth in England. It provides a brief historical overview of the North–South regional health and economic divide. This chapter also introduces the reader to the core concepts and theories which underpin the rest of the book including: the deprivation amplification thesis, intersectionality, and the syndemic pandemic concept. It discusses common approaches in the field of health geography to understanding place-based health inequalities, including: compositional, contextual, relational and political economy approaches. It concludes by providing a summary for each of the following chapters of the book.
