Stories for Asylum: Narrative and Credibility in the United States’ Political Asylum Application

Holland, Madeline

doi:10.7202/1055579ar

Cited by 10 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 7 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Testimony is expected to be linear, detailed, and have internal consistency [6]. Credibility includes the story itself that asylum seekers tell as well as how they tell it [7]. Persuading immigration officials that they have been or fear that they will be persecuted is the cornerstone of the asylum process.…”

Section: Persecution and Traumamentioning

confidence: 99%

Legal Interpretations of Trauma: The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Gender-Based Asylum Claims

Oxford

2024

Trauma Care

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article is based on exploratory research on how the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals uses the language of trauma in gender-based asylum claims. Gender-based asylum claims include female genital mutilation (FGM), coercive population control (CPC) in the form of forced abortions and forced sterilizations, rape, forced marriage, and domestic violence. The Circuit Courts have reviewed appeals from petitioners with asylum claims since 1946, yet the language of trauma did not appear in the Court’s decisions until 1983. From 1983 to 2023, only 385, 3.85% or less, of the over 10,000 asylum cases before the Circuit Courts used the language of trauma in its legal interpretation of persecution. I have identified 101 gender-based asylum cases that were reviewed by one of the eleven U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that apply the language of trauma in its legal interpretation of persecution for this analysis. The research question guiding this study is: how does the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals use the language of trauma when reviewing gender-based asylum cases? This study found that U.S. Circuit Courts use the language of trauma in four ways: precedent cases, policies and reports, physical trauma, and psychological trauma when reviewing gender-based asylum claims. This study provides the first data set of gender-based asylum claims under review at the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that use the language of trauma.

show abstract

Section: Persecution and Traumamentioning

confidence: 99%

Legal Interpretations of Trauma: The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Gender-Based Asylum Claims

Oxford

2024

Trauma Care

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Nor would he attempt to elaborate on why a return to his homeland would mean a threat to his life. 54 Instead of delivering an essentially monologic account of his experiences, he would tell his story in a way that prompted Stéphane Hacon to reflect on his own implication in T_____'s story.…”

Section: Students As Life Writersmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Difficult Passage to Navigate: From Asylum Story to Refugee Tale

Ramsey-Kurz

2023

EJLW

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article draws on the results of a life writing initiative, ARENA (Archive of Refugee Encounter Narratives), developed at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. It involves students of English collaborating with refugees over periods of three months to write down the latter’s stories. Like other storytelling ventures spawned by the perceived European refugee crisis of 2015, ARENA aims to enable a better understanding of the situation of refugees in Europe than the dominant asylum discourse allows. To this end, students arrange regular encounters with participating refugees and encourage them to tell whatever they consider to be their stories. The texts the students craft from these exchanges capture not only the refugees’ stories but also their own experience of hearing them. I will examine the embodied act of narration thus recorded in the ARENA corpus and contest critical claims that, too indebted to the rigid veracity standards defining official refugee testimonials, refugee life writing is unable to augment new ways of thinking about refugee experience and forced migration at large. My argument is that such criticism does not apply where the dialogic nature of live telling is consciously experienced and given due expression in the life writing it eventually becomes.

show abstract

“…In an examination of the narrative demands placed on asylum seekers to the US, historian and literary scholar Madeline Holland describes how literary norms may impact asylum seekers' cases: Western literary standards shape our understanding of what a 'true story' should sound like; this conflation of literary storytelling and truthful story-telling in the context of asylum proceedings can result in the failure to recognize 'true' stories told by asylum seekers. 67 A credible asylum story, Holland explains, making reference to Professor Stacy Caplow, an expert in asylum law, should be detailed, plausible and consistent. 68 Rendering trauma through an incoherent narrative in the autobiography Illegally Norwegian might have damaged the consistency and plausibility of Amelie's story.…”

Section: Literary Devices and Questions Of Reliability And Truthfulnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Challenging Nordic Exceptionalism: Norway in Literature by and about Irregular Migrants

Myhr

2021

Law & Literature

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

According to social scientists, the Nordic countries have claimed to have a unique humanitarian and peace-loving relationship to the colonialized or poor parts of the world, and, according to criminologists, the Nordic countries have exceptionally humane punitive systems. This article asks whether the native Norwegian author Simon Stranger's fictional account of the life of an irregular migrant in Norway may contribute something to the problematisation of the image of Norway as representative of a so-called Nordic Exceptionalism that two autobiographical accounts written by the irregular migrant Maria Amelie do notor cannotdo, and vice versa.

show abstract

Stories for Asylum: Narrative and Credibility in the United States’ Political Asylum Application

Cited by 10 publications

References 7 publications

Legal Interpretations of Trauma: The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Gender-Based Asylum Claims

Legal Interpretations of Trauma: The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Gender-Based Asylum Claims

A Difficult Passage to Navigate: From Asylum Story to Refugee Tale

Challenging Nordic Exceptionalism: Norway in Literature by and about Irregular Migrants

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About