Vulnerability in refugee regimes is conceptualized along various dimensions, ranging, e.g., from a precarious and sensitive legal status to the specific needs of refugees, furthermore including social, physical, and psychological aspects. Although asylum seekers can be categorized as vulnerable per se, there are several factors that may increase their vulnerability. These include individual characteristics such as age (children, unaccompanied minor refugees, the elderly), gender (women, pregnant women, single parents with minor children), medical reasons (people with special needs or serious physical and mental illnesses), experiences of violence (torture, rape, FGM), and sexual orientation or gender identity. Similarly important are changes in refugee regimes that lead to restrictions in access to asylum and to a growing number of deportations. However, researchers also highlight the agency of asylum seekers. Even the most vulnerable among them may develop strategies of dealing with the situation in which they find themselves.
Our two speakers draw on this wider research context to discuss factors of vulnerability as well as the resiliency of vulnerable asylum seekers.
Firstly, in her talk Too vulnerable to count: Categorizations of vulnerability in resettlement to Norway, Nerina Weiss analyses how Norwegian immigration authorities legitimise the fact that they have to exclude the most vulnerable from protection in resettlement programmes.
Secondly, in her presentation In the Aftermath of Asylum: Guatemalan Mayan Women’s Struggles in Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States, Linda Green focuses on a specifically vulnerable group of asylum seekers, namely Mayan women from Guatemala, their experiences of flight and their resiliency.
Chair:
Wiebke Sievers, Commission for Migration and Integration Research and Institute for Urban and Regional Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna
Discussants:
Maria Anna Six-Hohenbalken, Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna
Leonardo Schiocchet, Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna
When? 14 February 2024, 17.00 – 20.00
Where? Austrian Academy of Sciences, Bäckerstraße 13, 1010 Wien, Seminar room 2, Campus
Organized in cooperation with the Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna