Refugee and Asylum-Seeking Women’s Resilience: Rethinking Agency, Creative Processes, and Faith in Stoke-on-Trent, England

Abstract

The project explores how refugee and asylum-seeking women articulate resilience. It has developed theoretically and methodologically through a collaboration with seven women who have migrated to Stoke-on-Trent, England. It gathers ethnographic and arts-based methods to explore the how and why resilience is generated and attends to the multiplicity and varieties of the concept. The project prioritises a humanities-based approach to the study of resilience and heeds the call for humanities scholars to mobilize our work in the interests of connective engagement and political intervention (Hirsch 2014, 333). It thus aims to meaningfully contribute to the work of cultural and literary scholars currently advancing the theorisation of resilience (for examples, see Fraile-Marcos 2020; Mlambo, Kangira and Smith 2015). Resilience is theorised as a patchwork of numerous individual histories, as well as multiple social, cultural, and political relations. It engages with the concept as a granular, interactive process between individuals and their social ecologies. Approaching resilience from these perspectives has allowed me to identify context-specific and unnamed sources of resilience. These processes are forged, refined, and practiced in quotidian contexts and specific research contexts in ways that are not always predictable or visible. For this studys participants, resilience can be loosely grouped into three interrelated themes acts of agency, creative processes, and faith practices. Agency is about reorganising principles of success, control, and privacy when ones trajectory is curtailed by conditions brought about by migration. Creative processes can be found in the research and quotidian context. Ones belief in a higher power also informs resilience, but this relationship is unstable. They are not mutually exclusive.

Date of Award	13 Nov 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Anastasia Valassopoulos (Main Supervisor)