Paper Short Abstract:

For refugee families that experience family reunion the concept of family will be reconfigured following a period of separation. I will examine how refugee mothers who experience violence following family reunion negotiate meanings of love and how they use their love as mothers to negotiate rights.

Paper Abstract:

When Amal arrived in England with her two younger sons she had been separated from her husband for over five years. After a long family reunion process, Amal and her family reunited. However, a few days after being reunited her husband purposely disappeared. Amal explains: ‘that day I will always remember; I lost my husband, and I also lost my life partner’. In conflict and war, families often become separated and may be reunited years later. In that period of separation and in the time following their reunification, the meaning of family and love will be challenged and renegotiated. In this paper,I aim to unravel the ethnographic stories of three refugee women who, following family reunion had to reconfigure their life worlds when their families broke down. I will explore how the three women experience love and loss and will use the concept of abandonment as a lens to explore my ethnographic material. I will explore how their love as mothers becomes one of their driving forces both towards the violence endured in their marriages and as a political force when negotiating their rights for themselves and their children vis a vis the welfare state. How do these women understand love after the loss of a partner or the violence endured in a new country, how do they understand love as mothers? How do they use this love to negotiate access to rights? I argue that negotiating love and family rights in refugeehood entails both instrumental and profound emotional reasons.