Lecture 2 Flashcards
What is advocacy?
Advocacy means giving a person support to have their voice heard. It is a service aimed at helping people understand their rights and express their views.
Advocacy: public opinion and policy makers
Public opinion: public events, public meetings, social media campgaigns,
Policymakers: conferences, meetings/callss with policymakers, research, policy reports
What is refugee-led advocacy? Why does it matter?
Refugee-led advocacy a new form of advocacy > connecting lived experiences to policymaking
Meaningful refugee participation
Different structures and networks
Starting points
Policy is often detached from the experiences, wishes and perspectives of refugees.
Good intentions do not automatically lead to inclusive results
The predominant discourse of the migrant as ‘victim’, ‘poor’, ‘helpless’, and ‘threat’
The issue of legitimacy. Two dimensions; Credibility & Representativeness
Lack of acces to policymaking spaces (different type of spaces)
“Having a seat at the table”
[..] There is a direct and big impact of those policies on our life and it is not functioning. Si I started [with advocacy], my objective was to do something politically because on the fround there are many things that they are not working well and there is no channel that refugees, asylum seekers that they can have a direct access to somehow influence those policies or those decisions. (a refugee advocate based in Italy)
Power relations in policymaking spaces
Closed spaces: no acces to the table of decisionmaking
Invited spaces: sitting at the table is not inclusion of perspectives
Created spaces: spaces set up by refugees themselves
Co-created spaces: becoming aware of mechanisms of exclusion by contrasting positions
Moving to co-created space
Moving to co-created space
Levels of advocacy
What different roles can advocates take?
1st level advocacy; bringing personal narratives to shake assumptions and bring lifeworld of refugees closer (doesn’t go beyond your own experience)
2nd level advocacy; Bringing embedded narratives/experiences (relational consciousness). Understand how institutions work (practical consciousness).
In-betweenness (reflective consciousness)
–> Meaning of personal experience for policy context.
–> Contributing to policy desing.
3rd level; protective shelf, bring historical memory of the challenges refugees (advocates). Support function.
A trans-border manifesto
“We all share humanity; we all share responsibility”.
Wilthagen, Ton, Aarts, Emile & Valcke, Peggy (2018)
Other Forms of Transcendence of Disciplinarity
- Interdisciplinarity is a noun describing the interaction of two or more different disciplines. This interaction may range from simple communication of ideas to the mutual integration of organizing concepts, methodology, procedures, epistemology, terminology, data and terms organized into a common effort on a common problem with continuous intercommunication among the participants from the different disciplines.
- Multidisciplinarity (sometimes called pluridisciplinarity) is generally described as a joint or separately organized form of researching of an issue looked at from the point of view of several disciplines, whereby the disciplines continue to work with their own standard disciplinary frameworks.
- Cross-disciplinarity is also referred to in a specific sense as viewing a particular discipline from the perspective of another discipline, whereby aspects of one discipline can be explained by another discipline.
- Transdisciplinary research is described as a new field of research that is developing in the knowledge society and links science and policy to address problems such as environmental degradation, new technology, health, and social change. Through a transdisciplinary approach, researchers from different disciplines work together as well as with external stakeholders to tackle problems in the “real world”
- Postdisciplinarity has also been coined, whereby the starting point is that disciplinary structures are completely abandoned in favor of intellectual freedom. It could be understood as the definitive reunion or reintegration of individual disciplines.
Tracey (2019) Paradigmatic reflections and qualitative research territories
Paradigms are preferred ways of understanding reality, building knowledge, and gathering information about the world. They are collections of discourses that make up the philosophical assumptions that ground one’s point of view. Paradigms can differ based on ontology (the nature of reality), epistemology (the nature of knowledge), axiology (the values associated with areas of research and theorizing), or methodology (strategies for gathering, collecting, and analyzing data that connect with one’s philosophy about the world).
Paradigms: positivist, interpretive, critical, postmodern positivist and post positivist
- positivist paradigm (a realist or functional paradigm): a single true reality already exists “out there” in the world and is waiting to be discovered. Positivists conduct research to observe, measure, and predict empirical phenomena and build tangible, material knowledge. They strive for research to mirror reality, to represent clearly what is being examined.
- post positivist paradigm is like a positivist one in terms of aiming toward knowinga single material reality and searching for causal explanations of patterned phenomena. However, in contrast to positivists, post positivists believe that humans’ understanding of reality is inherently partial. Post positivists believe with certainty that reality exists and that there is good reason to try to know it. However, they also submit that human researchers and their methods have inherent weaknesses and biases. Given all this, capturing reality – in all its blooming, buzzing confusion – is improbable.
- Interpretive paradigm : which is also termed social construction , constructivist or constructionist – reality is not something “out there,” which a researcher can clearly explain, describe, or translate into a research report. Rather, both reality and knowledge are constructed and reproduced through communication, interaction, and practice.
- Critical paradigm: is based on the idea that thought is fundamentally mediated by power relations and that actions cannot be separated from the way knowledge is institutionalized and produced. Qualitative data cannot be separated from ideology. Critical researchers view cultural life as a constant tension between control and resistance, and they frame language as a type of power. Thus, ideas and knowledge can both control and liberate. Knowledge is constructed through communication and historical power relations. Hierarchical power differences unfold through everyday interaction. Over time, these power differences come to be seen as normal and natural. At the very least, critical research brings power relations to conscious awareness and, by doing so, provides
- An additional hallmark of the critical paradigm is the idea that oppression is most forceful when subordinates do not consciously understand their domination. In other words, power differences are potentially most destructive when people view their own powerlessness as natural, necessary, or inevitable. Postmodern and other “post” paradigms
- Post scholars approach knowledge and power as something dispersed, unstable, and plural. As such, the paradigm not only highlights occasions of domination and selfsubordination, but also accentuates avenues for resistance and change. This approach assumes that people have some space for agency and free will. People in weak circumstances have some power to challenge and reshape the constraints they face and people in traditionally authoritative roles are still governed by larger structures.
- Another aspect of the “post” paradigm is that studying power relations is necessary for understanding why some problems are so sedimented (solid and difficult to remedy), and how some ideas are held with more merit than others. When knowledge, education, and credentialing are only available to dominant, powerful, and wealthy people, the knowledge of subordinate members – which may be crucial for understanding a research problem – is often hidden, ignored, or undermined.
Ersanili & Koopmans (2010) - the role of citizenship acquisition on socio-cultural integration
- how to study sociocultural integration in academic and policy research. Two pathways that were studied: 1. citizenship as the crowning achievement of integration and 2. citizenship as a way of ensuring integration. This paper hypothesizes that easily accessible naturalisation promotes socio-cultural integration. Partial evidence in support but mostly not supported.
assumptions made in this paper and overall of the concept integration?
- Integration is a normalized concept (no discussion on what the sociocultural integration actually entails, no introduction on why the measures used are the illustration of sociocultural integration)
- Assumption that socio-cultural integration is the best way to go/pinnacle.
- Assumption that measures of socio-cultural integration are a fair representation of how people react to being in host society.
- Socio-cultural integration is also studied among second generation migrants.
