We are pleased to announce that The British Academy have funded a research project to allow us to explore the lived experience of refugee families after reunion.
‘When the Dust Settles’ aims at understanding the lived experience of refugee families one or more years after the arrival of relatives through the process of family reunion.
The project will focus on the longer-term experiences and needs of families post-reunion. We have identified that important decisions are often made around a year post-reunion or later, when transition and crisis start to give place to more established routines. In better understanding the longer-term needs of families, the project aims to have a direct impact on the work of organisations like Together Now.
Delivered by Maria Abranches, a Lecturer in Social Anthropology from the University of East Anglia (UEA), we will use participatory methods as an ethical and creative way of holistically exploring and understanding people’s needs and focusing on their capacity as ‘knowledge holders and sharers’.
This means that the research will combine oral narratives with audio-visual methods, and we will therefore be able to co-create a space for transformative possibilities and social justice, in a research context that will ultimately be more accessible, impactful, and have a broader reach.
We are committed to better understanding the experience of refugee families in the post-reunion period in the UK by focusing on the individual and family level, countering the tendency to homogenise and dehumanise individuals and families as a collective that is either threatening and dangerous, or vulnerable and helpless, devoid of historically situated experiences.
Over more than 10 years of supporting refugee family reunion, Together Now has been able to observe different patterns of experiences and needs at family level, which vary according to socioeconomic and educational background, the nature of the experience prior to displacement, and the conditions of resettlement, including the period leading up to family reunion, for example. This collaborative research aims at better understanding those patterns in a particular period of family life that is little understood, yet is likely to influence people’s everyday experiences in significant ways: once reunion has been achieved and families’ concerns have shifted away from the stressful and often traumatic process that led up to it.
A key part of the proposal is the creation of a Research Assistant post at UEA that is ringfenced to someone with lived experience of refugee family reunion. This post holder will play a key role in championing the voice of our clients throughout the piece of work.
We are looking forward to taking this time to better understand the long term impact of our work and hope to be able to establish key findings to inform our work and that of other organisations.
A key part of the proposal is the creation of a Research Assistant post at UEA that is ringfenced to someone with lived experience of refugee family reunion. This post holder will play a key role in championing the voice of our clients throughout the piece of work.
We are looking forward to taking this time to better understand the long term impact of our work and hope to be able to establish key findings to inform our work and that of other organisations.
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