Abstract
AbstractInterviews with both refugees and organizational staff in two nonprofit refugee resettlement organizations in the United States reveal the ways in which knowledge(s) and expertise are crafted, threatened, and understood in refugee organizations. Refugee-participants described the need for knowledgeable communication, barriers to the communication of knowledge, and processes of negotiating whose expertise is involved. Organizational staff participants described the duty of communicating expert knowledge, the limits of knowledge as expertise, and alternative communications of expertise. These tensions surrounding “knowing” in refugee resettlement organizations highlights the need for a more complex theoretical understanding of the processes of knowing present in refugee resettlement. These tensions also suggest areas in which refugee resettlement agencies and other nonprofit staff can make on-the-ground changes to better facilitate refugee resettlement processes.
Highlights
The United Nations defines refugees as persons who have crossed national borders due to a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion” (United Nations, 1951, Article 1)
While organizational staff frequently communicate important knowledge to refugee-clients about goods, services, and cultural life in the United States, their rhetorical positioning as “experts” on all things US can cause disappointment and frustration when those expectations are unmet. They express complicated feelings toward including refugees in the processes of “knowing” by both acknowledging that experiential expertise communicated by refugees to one another can serve as a valuable educational tool, but simultaneously fearing that such processes might discourage some refugees from integrating more fully into nonrefugee communities in the United States
In the end, interviews with refugees who had resettled in the United States and staff in the resettlement organizations designed to help that process revealed interesting tensions surrounding the constructions of knowledge and expertise
Summary
The United Nations defines refugees as persons who have crossed national borders due to a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion” (United Nations, 1951, Article 1). According to the UN High Commission for Refugees, 59.5 million people had been forcibly displaced from their homes by the end of 2014. The United Nations estimates that 19.5 million people meet their definition of a refugee (UNHCR, 2015b). The United Nations High Commission for Refugees seeks to aid refugees by supporting three durable solutions to their displacement—repatriation, integration, and resettlement. Repatriation efforts seek to return displaced individuals to their countries of origin through negotiations with local and regional leaders in areas of return. Integration efforts support naturalization of refugees or displaced persons in the communities to which they have fled. Resettlement efforts help relocate refugees to third nations with formal resettlement programs that allow the refugee to become a naturalized member of that nation (UNHCR, 2015a)
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