With millions of women experiencing forced displacement, attention is needed toward migrant women’s lived experiences. Religion is an understudied but central component of coping for many migrant women. Through the use of qualitative and quantitative methods, an exploratory study was conducted with 36 forced migrant Shia Muslim women residing in a predominantly Sunni Muslim country of first asylum. Using the brief Multidimensional Measure of Religiousness/Spirituality and drawing from feminist theory, intersectionality, and the ecological framework, we describe women’s experience with religion and spirituality across a variety of domains. Open-ended semistructured interviews were analyzed using a thematic analysis approach. Participants were highly religious across all domains measured. Key themes emerged related to how religion helps women manage stress, including: (1) trusting God to solve problems and (2) relying on prayer and other religious practices to cope. Despite these strengths, women also described major challenges to religious practice, where the third identified theme emphasized that fear and persecution limit religious practice. This article builds understanding of forced migrant women’s experiences, with implications for social work practice and immigration policy. Service organizations can recognize and support religious coping, particularly among religious minority refugee women. Additionally, practitioners and policy makers can promote religious tolerance and understanding within diverse host communities.
This article focuses on three collections of poetry by California poet Brenda Hillman, Cascadia, Practical Water, and Pieces of Air in the Epic, reading for the ways in which the poems model an affective interrelation between human and environment. These three works each focus on a traditional element (earth, water, air) in order to explore its co-constitution with the human, treating the element as active, or, in Jane Bennett's term, "vibrant matter." In the Anthropocene, it is no longer an "intentional fallacy" to attribute human emotions to the environment or its elements. Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is used throughout the article as a way to conceptualise this interrelation of human with environment; SAD suggests that in this era human and environment alike are disordered. I argue that, rather than staging a lyric subject regarding a landscape, Hillman's poems create a confusion of subject/object and foreground/background relations in which the origins of affects are impossible to determine and harms circulate. Affect is vital in understanding human motivations in relation to climate change, and Hillman's ecopoetic practice is an example of how we can shift our understanding of our affective relationship to the environment. Linguistic experimentation can shift awareness toward an understanding of the link between "what it felt like to have been a subject" and "what it felt like to have been earth" 1 as well as what it feels like now to be indeterminately both, intertwined and in crisis. There was a hurt that lay between two colors. a shade not resolved in the mind because it is the mind. 2 3 Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, and Practical Water.
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