Maria Abranches (East Anglia). When the Dust Settles: Exploring Temporalities amongst Reunited Refugee Families through Multi-Media Narratives
| Dates: | 31 March 2025 |
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| Times: | 15:00 - 17:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Maria Abranches |
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This seminar will reflect on the results of one year of fieldwork with refugee families in Manchester and Glasgow using a co-production approach based on narrative interviews and participant-led photography and film to understand post-reunion lived experience. While the consequences of separation following displacement, and the most immediate needs of refugee families once reunited, are well documented, continued support for refugee families is often inexistent or insufficient due to limited understanding of the challenges that occur in the longer term. Created by Dr Maria Abranches (University of East Anglia) and Amy Lythgoe (Together Now togethernow.org.uk), and supported by a British Academy Innovation Fellowship, the project explored how refugee families understand and respond to new and ongoing challenges they face after their first year together in the UK. Through photography and film, participant families chose to represent the experiences and responses they considered important for what they defined as their own research objective – to “correct stereotypes”. In the process, we explored the temporalities that were at the centre of people’s narratives. From the abruptness of initial displacement to long, fragmented, and uncertain journeys, a rushed sense of time and accelerated frenzy generated by fear of sudden detention or deportation upon arrival, and the slowness of years waiting for the decision of asylum claims and family reunion applications, the families we worked with move on to a more active and strategic waiting where a sense of direction and hope is associated with renewed possibilities for making a future.
Speaker
Maria Abranches
Organisation: University of East Anglia
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
Room 5.205
University Place
Manchester
