Preliminary Programme

I will discuss the intersections between gender, narratives of displacement and narratives of resettlement in the Sudanese refugee communities of Kakuma Refugee Camp (KRC)in northwestern Kenya and the Rogers Park area of Chicago, USA. Hearing about the plight of the “Lost Boys of Sudan,” two hundred of them now resettled in Chicago, I grew curious about what happened to the girls. It seemed impossible that no girls survived the ordeal of the massive exodus of children from Sudan in the late 1980s and early 1990s. According to a young male narrator of a documentary by filmmakers John Shenk and Megan Mylan, "The Lost Boys of Sudan," speaking of government soldiers and Arab militias who terrorized the southern Sudanese: “They took the young girls. They took them and used them up.” Women and girls got raped. This paper will address the ways in which this fact has complicated their marketability as viable immigrants, as innocent victims. I argue that the idea of girls in the hordes of unaccompanied children interrupts the romantic image that has been conjured around the “Lost Boys.” The fact is that young girls and women do reside at KRC. Indeed, they live under high degrees of gender violence, a violence that is normative in that space. What is it about the girls and women that lack appeal? What are the factors that contribute to offers of asylum and resettlement? Whose stories get favored? What are the consequences of these resettlement patterns for host communities? In this paper, I will explore the theme of gender and displacement and the implications of male dominance in refugee resettlement to community building among Sudanese both at KRC and here in Chicago. (Show less)

In this paper I analyse the marriage behavior of German migrants who settled permanently in the Netherlands in the period 1870-1940. Using recent reformulations of assimilation theory (Alba and Nee 2003) I show that in order to understand better the role of mixed marriages in the assimilation process, it is important not only to look at the ethnic dimension, but also to take religion, class and gender into account. (Show less)

This paper begins by interrogating the concept of homeland which is central in diasporic theory. It points to the need for multilayered understandings which include 1) homelands of nostalgic memory and 2) homelands of ultimate desire that will heal all separation and loss. To these must be added the usually neglected, everyday practices of the domestic dwelling place called home presided over by women as a third location of homeland. This opens up the significant question of whether there are gender differences not only in the experience of migration but in the construction of homeland.

To explore these issues, the paper then examines the comparative experience of the Irish exodus around the time of the famine, and the migration of Jews from Russia and East Central Europe between 1880-1920 to Britain and America. It compares how men and women perceived homeland. It spotlights the crucial but quite different role assigned to women in the home in creating the homeland of each ethnic group. For Irish women, in Ireland and abroad, new emphasis was placed on their role as the Madonna in the home as part of a cultural revolution that would deliver the new Irish nation, while the Jewish home created by women became, for most migrants, their key experience of homeland as well as a peripetetic site for the stateless nation. (Show less)

This paper will be based on my ongoing Ph.D. dissertation that I plan to defend at the end of 2005 which consists on the physical living conditions and economic survival strategies of the Kurdish families who have been directly or indirectly affected by the internal displacement phenomenon in Turkey after 1993 and who are now living in an inner-city slum neighbourhood (Tarlabasi in Beyoglu district). In my dissertation, I try to combine the socio-economic aspect of the forced migration issue to the spatial aspect within that neighbourhood that some researchers would even define as a “ghetto” and propose to look at the forced migration as a factor of social exclusion that reinforces the exclusion of the Kurds as an ethnic group from an accomplished citizenship.
In this paper, I aim to focus on the role of the women in the survival strategies of the Kurdish migrant families. Indeed, as on the one hand, the forced migration led to an unprecedented poverty for these families who have been forced to leave their villages in the South-eastern Anatolia, on the other hand, they developed coping strategies with this new livelihood (such as child work, street vending, informal or illegal activities). Two main actors played a central part in these strategies: while women organized the survival, the children were those who earned the main income of the households.
In my paper, first of all, I will try to present the survival strategies around the example of a Kurdish woman and her seven children. Then, I will discuss whether these strategies prove the “social exclusion” of this migrant group, or are they part of a long-term integration process. (Show less)