Abstract
The phenomenon of belonging allows diasporic people to negotiate socio-cultural terrains that go beyond singular attachments to “here” or “there”. This paper interrogates doing belonging amongst members of the Karen refugee community from Burma settling in Brisbane, Australia. We use data collected over twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork using the methods of participant observation and semi-structured interviews. This paper presents an interpretation of challenges faced by Karen community members as they grapple with local and transnational complexities of belonging within their own community, whilst also establishing belonging to Australian social environments. We argue that Karen participants’ lived experiences of settlement challenge bounded notions of belonging, thereby allowing us to extend dominant constructions of settlement and social inclusion and give way to a more nuanced representation of an emerging diasporic community. We thus reposition a resettled refugee community away from disempowering and exclusionary notions that dominant constructions of belonging and inclusion tend to impose. Keywords: Karen, belonging, settlement, refugee, transnational
Highlights
The phenomenon of belonging allows diasporic people to negotiate socio-cultural terrains that go beyond singular attachments to “here” or “there”
This paper presents a fuller picture of that process by switching the focus from more common and abstract discourse, such as settlement policy, to the real practices and events that contribute to processes of belonging for a community experiencing resettlement
We explore belonging work for the Karen refugee group as an example of the complexities of settlement faced by forced migrants
Summary
The phenomenon of belonging allows diasporic people to negotiate socio-cultural terrains that go beyond singular attachments to “here” or “there”. Take for example the phrase ‘Stop the Boats’, which provided a common point of political leverage for both primary political parties during the 2013 Australian federal election campaign, as both parties wanted to be seen to be addressing the growing (but relatively small) number of asylum seekers arriving in Australia by boat. This political slogan, as well as the related rhetoric categorising “boat people” as “queue jumpers” and “illegal immigrants” We regard doing belonging and belonging work as the daily activities and behaviours that allow the Karen to negotiate tensions of inclusion and exclusion, within their transnational context of “here”, “there” or “elsewhere”
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