The Institute for Global Health and Development

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/9

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‘At some points you feel awful because you are going to start again’: The ambiguous role of education in highly skilled refugee women’s integration experiences
(SAGE, 2024-09-25) Baillot, Helen; Fernandes, Marcus
In refugee and migration studies, education has been situated as both a marker of integration and a facilitator of progress in other domains. This paper draws on the accounts of three highly skilled women who have experienced forced migration to highlight some of the ambiguities of education’s role in pathways to social and economic inclusion. A case study approach allows for a detailed and contextual exploration of how intersections of age, caring responsibilities and immigration status influence women’s ability to engage with education. Participants’ accounts confirm that accessing desired and appropriate educational provision can propel people towards their longer-term goals. However, provision that is inaccessible or perceived to be below women’s skill levels can be experienced as exclusionary and demoralising, with attendant impact on women’s perceptions of integration and hopes for the future. Women deploy several strategies to overcome these obstacles, including leveraging existing social connections and re-evaluating their future career pathways. Yet these strategies are not always fully successful. Our findings point towards the need for improved provision for adult refugees and a concerted effort by educational institutions to tackle continuing systemic barriers to education.
Building an ethical research culture: Scholars of refugee background researching refugee-related issues
(Oxford University Press, 2024-03-25) Albtran, Ahmad; Aksu, Pinar; Al-Fakir, Zuhair; Al-Hashimi, Heidar; Baillot, Helen; Izzeddin, Azad; Johannes, Hyab; Kirkwood, Steve; Mfaco, Bulelani; Nicole, Tandy; Ní Raghallaigh, Muireann; Ogutu, Gordon; O’Reilly, Zoë; Younes, Angham
Recent scholarship on the need to decolonize refugee research, and migration research more generally, points to the urgency of challenging ongoing colonial power structures inherent in such research. Increased involvement of scholars with lived experience is one way to challenge and remake unequal and colonial power relations. Through discussions with researchers of forced migration, we aimed to explore the challenges, barriers, and supports related to involvement in such research, and to identify how research practices and structures could be improved to increase and facilitate the involvement of scholars with refugee backgrounds. In this field reflection, we highlight key points and suggestions for better research practice that emerged from these discussions. In doing so, we are endeavouring to contribute to the important ongoing conversation about ethics and decolonizing research. We build on existing ethical guidelines by opening up some of the complexities of ethical practice and offering concrete actions that can be taken to work through these.
Care as Resistance, Care as Agency, Care as a Burden: A Relational Exploration of the Impact of Giving and Receiving Care on Refugees’ Lives
(Oxford University Press, 2025-09-23) Baillot, Helen; Vera Espinoza, Marcia; Yurdakul, G.; Beaman, J.; Mügge, L.; Scuzzarello, S.; Sunanta, S.
This chapter discusses the multidimensionality and multidirectionality of care and its impact upon refugees’ pathways toward inclusion. Drawing on qualitative data collected during workshops and interviews with 55 recently recognized refugees in Scotland, the chapter explores how care in multiple forms is experienced, given, and negotiated. The chapter draws from ideas around care that conceptualize it as a means to resist restrictive government policies, as an expression of agency within familial and social contexts, and as a burden that affects people differentially as they seek to rebuild lives in new country contexts. In exploring the multiple dimensions and directions of care and the ways it intersects with gender and immigration status, among other social locations, we highlight conceptual and empirical parallels between care and integration. One, the text suggests, should not be understood without full consideration of the other. The chapter concludes by calling for care to be accorded a greater importance in explorations of refugees’ integration experiences, in ways that fully encompass care’s potentialities and limitations for the people who provide and receive it.
From Acts of Care to Practice-Based Resistance: Refugee-Sector Service Provision and Its Impact(s) on Integration
(MDPI, 2023-01-11) Käkelä, Emmaleena; Baillot, Helen; Kerlaff, Leyla; Vera Espinoza, Marcia
The UK refugee sector encompasses welfare provision, systems advocacy, capacity development and research. However, to date there has been little attention on refugees’ experiences of the support provided by these services or on the views of the practitioners who deliver them. This paper draws from interviews and workshops with thirty refugee beneficiaries of an integration service in Scotland and twenty practitioners to shed light on how refugees and practitioners perceive and provide meaning to the work of the refugee sector. We identify refugee sector organisations as crucial nodes in refugees’ social networks and explore the multiple roles they play in the integration process. Firstly, we confirm that refugee organisations act as connectors, linking refugees with wider networks of support. Secondly, we demonstrate that the work of the refugee sector involves acts of care that are of intrinsic value to refugees, over and above the achievement of tangible integration outcomes. Finally, we demonstrate that this care also involves acts that seek to overcome and subvert statutory system barriers. We propose to understand these acts as forms of “practice-based resistance” necessitated by a hostile policy environment. The findings expand on understandings of the refugee sector, its role in integration and the multi-faceted nature of integration processes.
“I just try my best to make them happy”: the role of intra-familial relationships of care in the integration of reunited refugee families
(Frontiers Media S.A., 2023-09-27) Baillot, Helen
Migration through managed routes such as spousal and work visas has been conceptualized as being a pragmatic choice driven by the needs of families rather than individuals. In contrast, studies of refugee integration post-migration have tended to analyse integration processes through the perspective of the individual rather than through a family lens. Drawing from data collection using a social connections mapping tool methodology with recently reunited refugee families supported by a third sector integration service in the UK, in this paper the author makes a valuable contribution to addressing this theoretical gap. The author explores the ambivalent ways in which family relationships, and the care that flows between family members, influence emotional, and practical aspects of refugees' integration. Empirically the inclusion of accounts from people occupying different positions within their families, including from children, adds depth to our understanding of integration from a refugee perspective. Conceptually, the paper argues that a focus on familial relationships of care re-positions refugees not as passive recipients of care, but active and agentive subjects who offer care to others. The paper ends with a call for integration to be understood in a family way that fully encompasses the opportunities and limitations offered by familial care.
Pathways and Potentialities: the role of social connections in the integration of reunited refugee families
(Queen Margaret University, 2020) Baillot, Helen; Kerlaff, Leyla; Dakessian, Arek; Strang, Alison
The Role of Social Connections in Refugees’ Pathways to Social and Economic Inclusion: Research Report 2020-2022
(Queen Margaret University, 2023) Baillot, Helen; Kerlaff, Leyla; Käkelä, Emmaleena; Vera Espinoza, Marcia
The role of social connections in refugees’ pathways towards socio-economic integration
(University of Oxford, 2023-01) Vera Espinoza, Marcia; Baillot, Helen; Käkelä, Emmaleena; Dakessian, Arek; Kerlaff, Leyla
Social connections are well recognised as contributing to integration. Research undertaken in Scotland offers useful, sometimes counter-intuitive insights into their role over time, plus learnings that could be explored in other contexts.
The Role of Social Connections, Time and Place in Refugees’ Pathways to Inclusion: Final Report 2020 - 2023
(Queen Margaret University, 2023-12) Kerlaff, Leyla; Baillot, Helen; Palombo, Gianluca; Fernandes, Marcus; Vera Espinoza, Marcia
his report outlines overall findings from the ABM3 New Scots: A Pathway to Social and Economic Inclusion Project which was funded by the Asylum Migration Integration Fund (AMIF) and delivered in three phases from October 2020 to December 2023. Here we focus on the third and final phase of the research conducted in 2023 while drawing on learning from Phase 1 (see Baillot et al., 2022) and from Phase 2 (Vidal and Palombo, 2022). More in-depth information is also available in our academic publications (see Käkelä et al., 2023; Vera Espinoza et al., 2023) and our interim reports. The three phases of the project and their respective aims are represented in the Timeline at figure 1. The ABM3 New Scots: Pathways to Social and Economic Inclusion Project is a partnership between researchers based at Queen Margaret University’s Institute for Global Health and Development and three third sector organisations who deliver specialist services: Scottish Refugee Council (integration planning), Workers’ Educational Association (English language assessment and learning) and Bridges Programmes (employability support). These practice partners have engaged with the research team to facilitate data collection, interpret findings and share mutual learning. The research component of the ABM3 project has explored the following research questions: 1. What is the role of social connections in refugees’ pathways to social and economic inclusion? 2. What meaning(s) do refugees ascribe to connections at different stages in their pathways? Building on our learning over the first two phases of the project, and to support our partners to adapt to the needs of their growing and changing client group,1 in the third phase we have focused in on the role of time and place in building social connections towards economic and social inclusion. The research team’s objectives for the project extension period were therefore to: • Explore how time and place impact the social connections that support specific means and markers of integration, including housing and employability; • Analyse the role of place in facilitating social connections between more recently arrived refugee people and more established residents in Scottish Local Authority (LA) areas; and • Discuss the contribution of AMIF partners to participants’ integration journeys. Names used in this report are all pseudonyms, to protect the identity and confidentiality of our participants.
‘Step by step’: the role of social connections in reunited refugee families’ navigation of statutory systems
(Informa UK Limited, 2023-01-25) Baillot, Helen; Kerlaff, Leyla; Dakessian, Arek; Strang, Alison
For asylum route refugees, the existence and persistence of structural barriers to navigating statutory systems are well-documented. Even when initial barriers are overcome, further transitions may disrupt refugees’ lives. One such is the arrival in the UK of family members from whom they had been separated during their flight from persecution. This paper draws upon data gathered using a Social Connections Mapping Tool methodology with reunited refugee families to make three contributions to the field of refugee studies. Firstly, families’ accounts of navigating statutory systems confirm the multi-directionality of integration. Refugees’ efforts to build and leverage social links proceed differentially across key statutory domains and cannot alone overcome systems barriers that require adaptation on the part of public services. Secondly, our findings contribute to scholarship that critiques the division of social relationships into categories of bonds, bridges and links, and the distinctions made between these based on ethnicity or nationality. Rather, refugees’ social relationships are more appropriately understood as a fluid continuum, with their nature and purpose subject to change. Finally, refugee families’ descriptions of settling in the UK highlight the influence of time on integration and the importance to refugees of re-building independence in a new country context.