Gender, (im)mobility and citizenship in a refugee women’s driving programme: exploring emotional citizenry in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

During resettlement, refugee-background women often become socially and spatially immobilised with heavy domestic responsibilities, lack of language skills, and lack of access to personal transport. To empower women to navigate spatial and social dimensions of resettlement landscapes, Wellington-based non-governmental organisation ChangeMakers Refugee Forum implemented a driving initiative entitled Turning the Curve. In this article we draw upon a mixed-method evaluation of Turning the Curve to explore differences within stakeholders’ assessments of the programme’s ‘success’. Specifically, we highlight tensions around the temporalities of ‘success’; with some individuals emphasising the achievement of a license in a set timeframe, and others supporting an open-ended approach. Paying attention to these temporalities enabled us to explore relationships between citizenship practices, patience, and waiting. We argue that Turning the Curve’s curation of spatial encounters between learner drivers and driving volunteers enacts Askins’ concept of emotional citizenry, and that the programme’s disposition to patience and a quiet politics of waiting extends emotional citizenry beyond space through time. Through this disposition, more innovative forms of being together emerge and women’s rights to the city are enabled. We conclude that other resettlement efforts could learn a great deal from the emotional citizenry of Turning the Curve as a means to enhance more gender-equitable outcomes from service provision and training during refugee resettlement.