Everyday Agency: Rethinking Refugee Women’s Agency in Specific Cultural Contexts

Abstract

This article proposes an interdisciplinary approach to refugee agency – the capacity to act within structural conditions – using the example of Syrian women rebuilding family and home in Turkey. Our broader objective is to prompt a re-thinking of refugee women’s everyday agency for scholars researching migration. The dominant manner of studying agency tends to be centered on refugees’ efforts to change their particular situations. Drawing on the latest theoretical propositions of cultural psychology (collective coping and the cultural coping model), we argue that agency can also be observed through examining how refugees rebuild their lives in the face of the many changes and challenges they have experienced. Guided by the cultural coping model, we describe stressors and coping strategies in context. With this approach, we can escape the trap of viewing refugee women in dichotomous ways, either as traumatized victims or as liberated from “traditional patriarchy.” A total of 33 semi-structured interviews were conducted in Turkey with Syrian, Arabic-speaking adult women. Interviews aimed to obtain comprehensive narratives on acculturation, daily stressors, coping strategies and everyday experiences of uprootedness. We used constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006) to identify significant themes (initial coding) and then code for more conceptual units of meaning (focused coding). The findings are structured around context specific themes: stressors and coping strategies. The study revealed three important types of stressors: family-related, role-related and place-related stressors. Each stressor can only be understood within the cultural context of inter-dependent agency, motherhood and neighborhood belonging, which are highly valued lived experiences of the refugee women. The study also identified three coping strategies: faith-based, home-making and identity building strategies. Our research shows that relying on Islamic understandings, creating the routines of a happy home and forging neighborly ties are important gender and culture specific manifestations of agency. The value of this research is that it provides migration scholars a useful model for designing research with female refugees. By identifying and writing about these specific and contextual forms of agency, researchers can provide better support to refugee women in their daily lives, while also challenging the image of passive “womenandchildren.”

Mysteries, Battles, and Games: Exploring Agency in Metaphors About Sexual Harassment

“…She expressed concern that reports might even hurt their immigration status. These results extend research about agency and coping, and the need for more analyses of contextual agency (Kanal & Rottmann, 2021). Through metaphors and symbolic framings, we can see how painful these agentic choices are in the case of sexual harassment.…”

“…For instance, Ashleigh leaning on her "mama bear" advisor or Faye, who described her university dean as a "gem" for trying to help her report, show that accessing social support can be crucial. Research with refugee women supports the need for contextual approaches to agency that take into account individual situations, as well as culture and identity (Kanal & Rottmann, 2021).…”

“…Theoretically, we extend research on agency and sexual harassment in organizations. We delineate how the metaphors highlight diminished agency for survivors, implicate organizations as agents in the harassment process, and suggest potential for contextualized “proxy” agency (Bandura, 2008; Kanal & Rottmann, 2021). Practically, we reveal how organizations can improve practices related to sexual harassment reporting and creating cultures of care (Dougherty, 2022).…”

Syrian Refugee Women in Lebanon. (c2022)

“…Their decisions to (or, indeed, ability to) act upon their agency were faced with obstacles that they could not avoid or overcome. This reminds us of the "stressors" that Kanal and Rottmann (2021) found when studying Syrian refugee women rebuilding family and home in Turkey. For this study, the stressor in case of Souad was family-related.…”

“…The ultimate purpose of the study was to introduce the cultural coping model for the purpose of reflecting on refugee agency which explains how these forced migrants experience different stressors and that would actually depend on which cultural context they are present in. The model assigns different levels of stressfulness to them and takes into consideration that there are different resources that they can use in addition to personal systems that are based on these cultural contexts (Kanal & Rottmann, 2021).…”