Paper short abstract:

The idea behind this article is to question the pre-established and seemingly objective categories of resistance and emancipation in the West by bringing them into the context of displaced women's lives.

Paper long abstract:

The research questions the pre-established categories of resistance and emancipation in the West by bringing them into the context of displaced women's lives. Qualitative data is collected at Europe's big entry point - the Western Mediterranean route (Barcelona, Spain) in 2019/2020. I argue that contextualizing individual destinies in migration management devices such as migrant labor unions, refugee camps, NGOs, foundations or unions would lead to a broader understanding of how migrant and refugee women come to individually resist and emancipate. In other words, this article questions the notions of emancipation, and resistance not as philosophical concepts, but as social experiences. It focuses on understanding how migrant and refugee women conceive and assign meaning to the idea of resistance and/or emancipation; how this idea is shaped during their lives as activists in unions; how it is built through contact and absence of public and private institutions; and how the idea is eventually integrated in their new everyday lives in host societies. This year-long qualitative research also seeks to understand how having to mobilize many different types of personal capital along with the migration route influences these individual's needs of the resistance-motivated battle some engage with. Through an ethnographic lens, I delve into the daily, intimate production of meaning attributed to resistance and/or emancipation from situations that came in and with displaced women to what is also known as fortress Europe.