Refugee resettlement in South America - WiP seminar

This week's Work in Progress seminar will be given by Dr Marcia Vera Espinosa. She is a Lecturer in Human Geography at Queen Mary University of London. She is also Associate Researcher in the project 'Prospects for International Migration Governance' (MIGPROSP). Her research interests are in refugee and migrant integration, international and regional migration governance, forced migration and immigration policies in Latin America. Marcia has recently published in Global Policy, Forced Migration Review and Development Policy Review. She is currently working in the co-edited book ‘The Dynamics of Regional Migration Governance’ to be published by Edward Elgar Publishing.

Her talk will explore how the negotiations and power relationships between resettled refugees and actors involved in the resettlement programme in Chile and Brazil affected refugees’ experience. Drawing in data collected in two extended fieldwork visits in Chile and Brazil, Marcia will trace the encounters and unfulfilled expectations held by Colombian and Palestinian resettled refugees and the resettlement programmes in each country. She argues that the tensions that emerged between the programme organisers and refugees, shaped the experience as one of ‘unsettlement’ by which refugees’ radical uncertainties created by displacement, extended and normalised into third country resettlement.

The seminar will be held in the student hub on the third floor of the Abercrombie building (Headington campus). Please see here for further details and for a list of the entire seminar series.