2025/03/18 by Sophia Balakian · 1 voice · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Migration and Labor Dynamics #Migration, Refugees, and Integration #Sex work and related issues
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/01419870.2025.2474623
openalex publication_date 2025/03/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
Dominant discourses about refugee resettlement position refugees as passive objects of rescue. Organizations that manage resettlement view the use of professionals or attempts to garner inside information about the process as illegitimate. But resettlement involves active work on the part of people living as refugees, who spend years interviewing, following up with organizations, traveling to different bureaucratic offices, and seeking scarce information about complex, shifting procedures in politically complicated contexts. While scholarship on resettlement in global South locations has often critically investigated categories like “fraud” or “cheating” in the resettlement process, those foci may obscure more mundane ways that people actively work on their own, and others’, resettlement futures. Formal brokers, ad hoc helpers, and those who leverage assistance from both inside and outside of their communities reveal resettlement as not simply a pathway to migration, but a form of work that people living as refugees actively perform.