Addressing societal discourses: negotiating an employable identity as a former refugee

ABSTRACT

This paper explores a critical area of refugee resettlement, namely securing stable, desirable employment in host nations. When telling their ‘narratives of flight’, our analytic focus, refugees demonstrate discursive agency and identities that conflict with a societal stereotype of vulnerability and helplessness that employers might expect. Insights suggest opportunities for new ways of supporting former refugees to find appropriate employment in a context in which their agency may be constrained and their strengths overlooked. This includes challenges to wider societal discourses and a two-way strategy where onus is placed on ‘hosts’ as much as on newcomers.

تبحث هذه الورقة في أحد أهم المناحي المتعلقة بإعادة توطين اللاجئين، وبالتحديد الجانب المتعلق بتأمين فرص عمل ذات طابع مستقر ويتناسب مع قدرات اللاجئين في الدول المستضيفة. فحين يروي اللاجئون رحلة اللجوء فإنهم يبرزون إرادة وهوية تتعارض مع ما قد يتوقعه أرباب العمل مما يسود في المجتمع من صور نمطية عنهم كالضعف واليأس. ومن خلال هذه فإننا نجد الفرصة متاحة لإقتراح وسائل جديدة والتي من خلالها يمكن توفير الدعم لمن قدم كلاجئ في سبيل إيجاد الوظائف اللائقة في ظروف قد تتقيد فيها إرادتهم وتُغفل نقاط قوتهم. ويتضمن ذلك تحديات للخطاب المجتمعي السائد، بالإضافة الى استراتيجية ثنائية الأقطاب يتم من خلالها تحميل العبء على “المضيفين” بقدر متساوي مع القادمين الجدد.

KEYWORDS:

• Former refugees
• employable identities
• societal discourses
• narrative
• social action
• Interactional Sociolinguistics

Acknowledgement

As always, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to the participants who cooperated and collaborated with us in this research. We also thank our colleagues in the Language in the Workplace team (Janet Holmes and Bernadette Vine) who have contributed to our understanding and offered feedback on our analysis. We are particularly grateful to Shelley Dawson for the feedback and support she provided to us during the preparation of this paper, and we thank Mohammed Nofal for translating this paper’s abstract into Arabic as the most common language of our participants. The doctoral research from which the data was taken was funded by a Doctoral Scholarship from Victoria University of Wellington.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Transcription conventions

Table

Notes on contributors

Emily Greenbank completed a PhD in Linguistics in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. Her research explores former refugees’ experiences in the labour market in New Zealand from a discursive, sociolinguistic perspective. This research is summarised in her recent book Discursive navigation of employable identities in the narratives of former refugees (John Benjamins, 2020). Emily has also been involved with projects exploring language in the workplace, heritage language maintenance, and health and wellbeing.

Meredith Marra is Professor in Linguistics and Head of School (Linguistics and Applied Language Studies) at Victoria University of Wellington. She has published research on leadership, ethnicity and gender identities within workplace discourse analysis as well as on sociopragmatic issues such as community norms and practices, humour and intercultural interaction. She is Director of the Language in the Workplace Project, a long-standing sociolinguistic research project which investigates effective workplace communication in New Zealand.

ORCID

Meredith Marra http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1862-6488

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The term skilled migrant here refers to tertiary-educated migrants who came to New Zealand voluntarily (in contrast to refugees’ forced migration). The skilled migrants who the LWP team worked with had been unable to access employed in their desired professions for two years or more (Marra, 2012).

2 All participants' names are pseudonyms.

3 Arwa requested that her country of origin not be specifically named in this research.

4 We use physical here to describe Kelly’s husband’s restrictions on her whereabouts and activities rather than to suggest he used violence to do so. Whether he used physical force or power imbued by social structure (or both) is unknown to us.

5 The other ‘mechanisms’ are inclusion, the reporting of events and periods of life that are compatible with the story’s end point; and flattening, or the minimising of reported events and life periods in the life history, allowing the speaker to mention a ‘fact’ but simultaneously note its narrative insignificance (Spector-Mersel, 2011).

6 For examples of these resources see these government websites, noting that resources are aimed and marketed at both employees and employers: https://worktalk.immigration.govt.nz/; https://www.newzealandnow.govt.nz/work-in-nz/finding-work/job-interviews; https://www.newzealandnow.govt.nz/resources/working-in-aged-care.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Doctoral Scholarship awarded by Victoria University of Wellington.