Beyond Refuge: Contested Orientalism and Persons of Self-Rescue

Welcoming Refugees and the Virtue of Hospitality: An Analysis of Refugee Resettlement through Private Sponsorship in Small-Town Eastern Ontario

“…Similarly, the notions of welcome and hospitality that entrench the majority of refugee-related rhetoric and public imagery create compassionate narratives who tend to portray refugees as passive victims needing to be rescued (Canas, 2017). Kyriakides et al (2018) further argue that:…”

“…So, what does integration under these terms actually look like? As it turns out, the reception context is complex and nuanced (Kyriakides, Bajjali, McLuhan, & Anderson, 2018) indicating that integration for PSRs isn't so straightforward. In fact, a few recent critical studies on host-refugee-community dynamics of resettlement have uncovered important insights such as the role of social relationships and connections in facilitating integration (Macklin et al, 2018;Drolet & Moorthi, 2018).…”

“…Consequently, Western media representations play the same, critical role in framing both public perception and political discussions about refugees (Aarssen, 2017). Drawing on the concept of Orientalism, Kyriakides et al (2018) argue that Orientalist scripts of refuge, as "a set of political and media-validated scripts" (p.60), shape Western ideas of the refugee, particularly in relation to the cultural construction of the war induced "refugee crisis" in the Middle-East.…”

“…The global circulation of images of 3-year old Alan Kurdi is one such example of how processes of Othering are constantly in the making, as Kurdi became the symbol of the Syrian crisis, and participated in the constitution of the Syrian refugees as worthy of saving despite his attachment to Islam. Kyriakides et al (2018) further complicate the process of Othering in the context of reception by bringing to focus how refugees themselves navigate their "refugeeness", a "contested condition of existence in which the figure of the refugee is constructed by policy practices and media representations" (2018, p. 60). In observing the interactive dynamic between private sponsors and sponsored refugees, they discover that the representations of passivity and infantilization are "negotiated" as part of the resettlement experience (p.60).…”

Caring for Refugees: Questioning the Public-Private Dichotomy in Canadian Resettlement

“…The next chapter looks for the hidden caring relations within the GAR program, finding that the broad bureaucratic category obscures the diverse caring relations in practice.Some of the literature on private sponsorship examines the micro-level relationships between sponsors and sponsored refugees. Scholars have analyzed this relationship drawing on concepts of a "pastoral rationality," 230 a "master-dependent relationship," 231 kinship metaphors,232 frameworks of Orientalism,233 the re-establishment and recognition of pre-conflict social roles,234 and the achievement of stability for refugees by the end of the sponsorship period 235. Similar to care ethics, many of these scholars identify the power dynamics and hierarchies inherent in the sponsorship relationship.…”