Gender boundary negotiation within the U.S. immigrant/refugee resettlement : how transnational bridge-building matters.

Abstract

For the past several decades, social research about U.S. immigrant and refugee resettlement has focused on some of the ways federal and non-governmental organizations help immigrants and refugees integrate into mainstream society. Little research, if any, has explored how giving voice to immigrants and refugees is done in bridging transnational gaps and strengths in the process of their adjustment to the host country. This dissertation is grounded within transnational theory (Avenarius 2012, Levitt 2011, Peteet 1997) that argues that immigrants and refugees bring their experiences and cultures from their home countries, time in refugee camps, and other often traumatic experiences with them to the host country and a new culture. The study focuses on an organization solely funded by private donations and located in a Midwestern medium size city of the United States. The model is to encourage immigrant and refugee parents, predominantly women enrolling in Welcome Home 1 programs, to set up and work toward their own goals. The Welcome Home Program offers parents from diverse cultural backgrounds a new social space characterized by on-demand family coaching. At the same time, the program offers opportunities to parents to learn financial literacy. The program also replicates the national literacy model that puts emphasis on parent-child interactions in promoting children's academic development. The social context thus created functions primarily as an opportunity for family units to think about themselves as active players in the process of their adjustment to the United States. This research explores constant gender negotiations immigrant and refugee women and men engage in and how they accommodate new expectations and opportunities with their experiences in refugee camps and their socialization in their home countries.

Marriage among U.S. International Students: Meanings and Aspirations

“…According to transnational theory, newcomers to a host country do not surrender their cultural values (Kagaba, 2018;Olwig, 2003); nor do they abandon their conceptions of the gendered structures that exist in their home countries (Koyama, 2015;Levitt, 2011). As Olwig (2003) explains in her study of migrant aspirations, newcomers do not just "perceive places of origin in terms of their transnational character, but just as much in terms of the particular cultural values and social ties that the migrants and their families practice in relation to these places" (p. 788).…”

Viewpoints of Other Scientists on Migration, Mental Health and PTSD: Review of Relevant Literature

“…Mabeya (2017) reported that the "Lost Boys," Sudanese refugees boys who relocated to the US assisted by the US government as a result of intensely bloody and protracted warfare in their home country then known as Sudan had a bad experience in the US because of their education level. Kagaba (2018) stated that in adjustment to the host country, these immigrants or refugee parents engage in social exchanges, such as with other immigrants or refugees, and resettlement program workers that can self-identify in terms of class, gender, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, the parents simultaneously utilize their own pre-existing gender boundary negotiation strategies. For instance, parents who used to deal with tribal or religious differences in their homelands are expected to navigate a social context characterized by cultural norms and mores based on their own tribal and/or ethnic differences, various experiences during their displacement, national differences with other immigrant or refugee communities, and the US culture by doing that they engage in bridging multiple simultaneous transnational cultural gaps to the host country.…”