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- Convenors:
-
Annett Fleischer
(Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity)
Antje Missbach (Bielefeld University)
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- Stream:
- Migration
- Location:
- ZHG 002
- Start time:
- 29 March, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel invites proposals for papers from different geographic and political contexts that critically challenge the way asylum seekers and refugees are accommodated, short-, mid- and long-term.
Long Abstract:
This panel invites proposals for papers from different geographic and
political contexts that critically challenge the way asylum seekers and refugees are accommodated, short-, mid- and long-term. By comparing aspects of location, design and service of various accommodation sites both in transit or destination countries we hope to shed light on questions regarding the responsibilities of the respective hosting states and non-state service providers such as private facility operators, charity organisations, the International Organisation of Migration (IOM) or even the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). Learning from and about diverse accommodation arrangements and their respective capacities for addressing asylum seekers' needs and aspirations is expected to provide insights relevant for Critical Migration Studies within Social Sciences. The panel is particularly concerned with a problematisation of temporality of asylum seeker and refugee accommodation.
Further questions of interest include:
1) What conditions do state and non-state providers for asylum seeker and refugee accommodation consider adequate for housing for asylum seekers and how did their guidelines evolve?
2) What role does accommodation play in the process of applying for asylum?
3) What measures of integration are built into accommodating asylum seekers and refugees and in which way are they decisive for conditioning and channelling their trajectories?
4) How do asylum seekers and refugees themselves view advantages and disadvantages of decentralized versus centralized forms of accommodation?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
In my paper, first results of a field research in an emergency refugee shelter in Berlin, Germany, are presented.
Paper long abstract:
During their asylum procedures, refugees in Germany are given accommodation. However, there is a wide variety in the reality of housing: from gyms or containers over old military barracks to well-equipped houses or single apartments in conventional apartment houses. Due to the rising numbers of refugees seeking asylum in Germany, a lack of infrastructure and accommodation became obvious at the latest in 2015. Hundreds of emergency shelters were opened and several do still exist.
Refugee homes generate a specific social structure that has a deep impact on the refugees` identity and agency. For that reason, my research focuses on the subjective perspectives and experiences of refugees in regard to their housing situation. In this paper, I present the results of my first case study, an emergency shelter in a gym in Berlin, Germany. I will examine the impact of this specific type of accommodation on the residents` subjectivity and agency. Furthermore, ways of how the refugees try to regain agency are presented. The questions addressed are:
1.) Which specific space is constituted in the context of an emergency refugee accommodation?
2.) Which types of subjects are fostered in this certain arrangement of space?
3.) Production of agency:
• How does this specific constitution of space and subjectivity affect the agency of the residents?
• Which strategies do the refugees, employees of the refugee homes, volunteers and full-time supporters of the refugees carry out in order to expand their agency?
The analysis is based on participant observation and (group) interviews with refugees, employees of the refugee home, volunteers and full-time supporters.
Paper short abstract:
Asylum seekers and refugees in Malaysia have no formal access to accommodation. I present four extremes of the refugee experience to highlight the disparity: living in a high rise condo, dwelling in a rural homestead, being housed in a high-density urban flat and shelved in a detention facility.
Paper long abstract:
I present three extremes of the refugee experience in Malaysia, dwelling in a rural homestead, being housed in a high-density urban flat and shelved in a rundown detention facility to highlight the disparity of refugee housing. Asylum seekers and refugees in Malaysia generally have no access to accommodation by the government or service providers. Some refugee organisations provide limited shelter facilities and unaccompanied minors can be sheltered in NGO shelters; however, the state only provides one extreme form of housing for refugees: detention. These facilities are underfunded and run down. Refugees are often shelved there for months until the UNHCR can act to release them. Refugees are on the whole responsible for their own housing needs and many are housed by their employers in small urban flats with many others. These cramped conditions at low pay and long hours present another form of dystopian living. Some, lucky few, refugees have found ways to leave the city and find rural work. Here, at a slower pace, refugees can dwell on the land and replicate a rural lifestyle, whilst an even more select group of refugees are able to find well paid jobs or rely on savings to afford an expat lifestyle, living in high rise urban condominiums.
Paper short abstract:
Former tourism infrastructures are the primary means of accommodating asylum seekers in Austria. This paper discusses the challenges both guests and hosts are facing in this accommodation in the absence of spatial guidelines for asylum seeker accommodation in Austria.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on the accommodation of asylum seekers in former tourism infrastructures in Austria. It lays out why small-scale hotels and bed and breakfast establishments are predominantly used and illustrates the challenges both guests and hosts are facing in the absences of spatial guidelines for asylum seeker accommodation that acknowledge the needs of forcibly displaced people and facilitate a sense of arrival.
The persistence in using tourist accommodation as a place of refuge since the 1950s is a consequence of the over-supply of low-standard or unclassified tourist facilities in often remote parts of Austria as well as of the strategic advantages that the small-scale structure of the tourism industry provides for the Austrian asylum system.
Proprietors are both responsible for the operation of the accommodation and expected to care for people in need of protection with special (housing) needs. The process of transforming a tourism establishment into accommodation for asylum seekers does not require Austrian proprietors to show evidence of any special training in the provision of space and care for asylum seekers nor to employ qualified staff.
Further, there are no minimum standards for the accommodation of asylum seekers but only extremely vague guidelines to be followed by both provincial governments and proprietors. Far too often it is left to operators of accommodation to determine whether the space provided allows not only for physical but also psychological refuge and offers an environment with which the refugees can identify and in which they can rediscover the notion of living.
Paper short abstract:
The Turkish protection regime in the face of Syrian Crisis denies the accommodation as a refugee right. This paper explores the urban accommodation of Syrian refugees at the Turkish geographic margins facilitated through the networks of informal housing and economy, as well as relief distribution.
Paper long abstract:
The Turkish protection regime and local governments accentuate hospitality rather than accommodation in the face of Syrian influx across its border and do not grant the accommodation as a refugee right, although the camps for fleeing Syrians are allocated as "temporary protection centers". Based on the fieldwork on slum areas of Gaziantep, a border city, this paper explores the urban accommodation of Syrian refugees at the geographic margins of Turkey. The Turkish government enforces their concentration at the border cities under a temporary protection regime, compelling the lower-class urban refugees to engage in place-making in the midst of dispossession, disenfranchisement and precarity. Their outnumbering in slum areas changes the demography of urban settlements, while pitting the locals against the refugees and even escalating tension into sporadic mass violence against the latter. Drawing on Asef Bayat's notion of "quiet encroachment of the ordinary", the paper analyzes how the refugee and local communities contend each other in appropriating the urban space and collective consumption through networks of informal housing and economy, as well as relief distribution. As a conclusion, the paper argues, the withholding of urban accommodation as a refugee right does not prevent the refugees from encroaching on the urban space and making their place in the city. But it deprives them from their right to city, turns them into a domicile labor force on the hook for the Turkish and Syrian entrepreneurs and undermines the urban cohabitation of the two communities.