Research

Power and Politics of Trauma in Canadian Refugee Settlement

My SSHRC-funded doctoral work theorises trauma and mental health as influential sites of power and contestation in refugee settlement. It seeks to understand how violence shapes refugee-host relations after relocation to Canada. Based on 18-months of immersive qualitative research and interviews/focus groups with over 115 participants, I argue that dominant, Eurocentric medical trauma models incentivize even the most motivated (predominantly) non-immigrant hosts to misrecognize refuge seeker distress, amplify harm, and undermine refugee-host relations. This structural argument circumvents conventional explanations on the negative social impacts of trauma based in ongoing pathology, generating instead a series of institutional-level interventions to improve refugee integration and mental health.
 

U.S. Refugee Resettlement under the first Trump Adminstration

Robust and responsive organizations are crucial for supporting refugees. Yet resettlement sectors are increasingly faced with challenging political climates, as my colleagues and I articulate in our Introduction to the Refugee Survey Quarterly Special Issue, 'Resettlement at a Crossroads'. What are the impacts of challenging policy environments on human service organizations, and how can they survive and mobilize in response? In a case study of the first Trump Administration's anti-refugee policy published in Human Service Organizations: Management, Leadership, and Governance, Jessica Darrow and I argue that the policy shocks impacted U.S. resettlement organizations beyond routine instability predicted by resource dependence, challenging the public-private partnership that historically defined the sector. Our follow-up article in Refugee Survey Quarterly shows how organizational leaders nonetheless responded to not only survive policy attacks but also build resilience and contest exploitative terms. 

I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of Chicago Community Engagement Grant for their generous support of my research projects.