Leading refugee lives together: Familial agency as a political capacity

Abstract

Family life is constituted by affective relationships and emotional bonds between individuals connected through kinship, yet in many cases involving people from beyond the lineal descent group as well. In precarious migratory processes and situations, the significance of these relations often grows. Even if put under increased pressure, they encompass important resources that individuals alone could not possess. Then again, for some people certain familial relations are part of the problematized life situation, challenging rather than reinforcing their personal agency. This paper explores political dimensions of refugee agency and discusses how mundane familial political agency is acquired and practiced in refugee situations. Specifically, analyzed are intimate relationships as unfolding in some young male refugees' transnational lives, as personal and shared experiences and practices. The paper takes notice of conflicted familial relations, too, to create a better understanding about the manifoldness of intergenerational political agencies. Drawing from interviews with Iraqi, Afghan and Somali refugees, it demonstrates how familial agency is irreducible to the personal agencies of family members yet does not exist beyond subjective stances. In conclusion, the paper proposes that familial mundane politics remain poorly noticed in refugee situations, which harmfully effects on the humanitarian aid system as well as refugee lives.

Refugees in the IT Sector: Young Syrians’ Economic Subjectivities and Familial Lives in Jordan

“…Yet, as Popke and Torres argue, family interests “can be pursued in different ways, some of which might enhance the visions of individual agency, whereas others suggest a more collective understanding of the social” (2013, 220). As this article will show, refugees’ intimate and family relations constitute spaces where “more‐than‐individual forms of engagement” with economic relations can happen (Harker , 2625; see also Nash ; Valentine ; Harker ; Kallio ). As such, while some of their oppressively gendered aspects are reproduced, they are also sites where models of refugee protection based on the imperatives of self‐reliance, entrepreneurship, and competition are challenged.…”

“…Focusing on the “coding boot camp,” an emerging educational format in the field of ICT training targeting refugees, it explores how young Syrians approach a humanitarian regime in which, in the absence of full legal and social rights for refugees, the question of their material and financial subsistence is addressed through the paradigms of self‐reliance, creativity, technological innovation, and entrepreneurship. I argue that policies targeting refugees as individualized economic subjects are countered by the intimately entangled family and community relations that characterize the experience of refugeeness, both at a local and at a transnational level (Torres and others ; Kallio, ; see also Hyndman ; Nagar and others ; Mountz and Hyndman ). The findings expand upon recent geographical and development scholarship that has explored the complex intersections of neoliberal governmentality and subjectivity and the migrant and refugee condition.…”

The Politics of undocumented migrant childhoods: agency, rights, vulnerability

“…However, as I will show later, motherwork can also be enacted by children and consequently, as Kirsi Pauliina Kallio puts it, "political agency" is an "intergenerational human condition" (Kallio, 2015a). In this special issue, Kallio develops an understanding of the concept of "familial political agency" and argues that this concept helps understand how "political agency is developed and practiced subjectively and through sharing, leaning on emotional bonds and affective relations" (Kallio, 2018). To apply an analytical lens of familial political agency is to acknowledge the interdependency of children's (Article 1) and parent's political agency.…”

“…Significant contributions to theoretical debates on children's politics and political agency have been made by geographers Kirsi Pauliina Kallio and Jouni Häkli (together and separately) (Häkli & Kallio, 2014;Kallio, 2007Kallio, , 2008Kallio, , 2009Kallio, , 2015aKallio, , 2015bKallio, , 2016Kallio, , 2018Kallio & Häkli, 2010, 2011a, 2011b. They argue that children's politics can potentially be found in any aspect of mundane everyday life.…”

“…Motherwork, understood as humanitarian agency expressed through unrecognised parental practices of care, can be understood as parental political agency. However, motherwork can also be performed by children since political agency is an "intergenerational human condition" (Kallio, 2015a(Kallio, , 2018. The shifting intergenerational positions of undocumented migrant children have been described as an "intergenerational rupture" and the "parentification" of children who take care of family responsibilities (Vandenhole et al, 2011).…”