Gender, (im)mobility and citizenship in a refugee women’s driving programme: exploring emotional citizenry in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

During resettlement, refugee-background women often become socially and spatially immobilised with heavy domestic responsibilities, lack of language skills, and lack of access to personal transport. To empower women to navigate spatial and social dimensions of resettlement landscapes, Wellington-based non-governmental organisation ChangeMakers Refugee Forum implemented a driving initiative entitled Turning the Curve. In this article we draw upon a mixed-method evaluation of Turning the Curve to explore differences within stakeholders’ assessments of the programme’s ‘success’. Specifically, we highlight tensions around the temporalities of ‘success’; with some individuals emphasising the achievement of a license in a set timeframe, and others supporting an open-ended approach. Paying attention to these temporalities enabled us to explore relationships between citizenship practices, patience, and waiting. We argue that Turning the Curve’s curation of spatial encounters between learner drivers and driving volunteers enacts Askins’ concept of emotional citizenry, and that the programme’s disposition to patience and a quiet politics of waiting extends emotional citizenry beyond space through time. Through this disposition, more innovative forms of being together emerge and women’s rights to the city are enabled. We conclude that other resettlement efforts could learn a great deal from the emotional citizenry of Turning the Curve as a means to enhance more gender-equitable outcomes from service provision and training during refugee resettlement.

Keywords:

• Driving
• emotional citizenry
• gender
• patience
• refugee
• time

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the participation of all contributors, particularly the members of the Steering Group and the Programme Administrator from ChangeMakers. They also wish to acknowledge New Horizons for Women Trust, who provided funding to support the first author whilst she carried out this research, and the peer-reviewers who provided insightful feedback prior to publication of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the New Horizons for Women Trust under the New Zealand Federation of Graduate Women Wellington Branch Research Award.

Notes on contributors

Amber Kale

At the time of the evaluation, Amber kale was a BA Honours in Human Geography student in the School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington (VUW). She is currently a PhD candidate in Human Geography at VUW. Her research uses participatory multisensory methodologies to explore experiences of displacement, place-attachment, and holistic wellbeing in refugee resettlement. She has volunteered for various organisations in the Wellington refugee resettlement sector since 2013.

Sara Kindon

Sara Kindon is a Professor of Human Geography and Development Studies in the School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington. As a social and feminist geographer, she focuses on the practice, theorisation and publication of participatory and visual geographic research, most recently with refugee-background communities, Latin American women, and Te Iwi o Ngaati Hauiti in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her work has been published in edited books and international journals in Geography, Development Studies and Cross-cultural Psychology.