Negotiating Refugee Empowerment(s) in Resettlement Organizations

ABSTRACT

In-depth interviews with both organizational staff and refugee clients in two American refugee resettlement organizations explore how empowerment is communicated to and understood by refugees being “empowered.” This study found that while organizational staff professed empowerment focused on self-sufficiency as self-determination, in practice their communication to clients defined self-sufficiency a priori in economic terms. Refugee clients instead constructed empowerment(s) in economic, educational, personal, and family terms. These findings highlight the need for changes in U.S. resettlement policy and for theoretical and practical understandings of refugee empowerment to recognize polysemic and conflicting empowerments in different life arenas and from different positionalities.

KEYWORDS:

• Empowerment
• refugees
• nonprofit
• resettlement
• communication

Funding

This manuscript draws, in part, from the author's larger dissertation project on communicative tensions in mediating refugee resettlement organizations, supervised by Dr. Kathleen Krone, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It was funded, in part, by the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.