MAKING REFUGE WORK: LIFE AND LIVELIHOOD AMONG YEMENI REFUGEES IN EUROPE

ongoing

Making Refuge Work addresses the limits of state-centric approaches in migration studies and proposes the lens of labor to tell the story of Yemeni refugees-turned workers as they struggle to make life and a living in Europe’s urban centers. Moving to the fore those whose stories and experiences remain otherwise invisible, my project proposes to consider refuge not as a gift of sanctuary, or a privileged legal status, but as a terrain of struggle for displaced people, who actively pursuit dignified lives and work hard to construct their futures. Drawing on an ethnographic study with Yemeni refugees in Germany and Netherlands - the two countries with the largest and most rapidly growing Yemeni communities in the EU, the project sets outs to investigate how refugees navigate Europe’s neoliberal economies, and how they become classed and racialized in the process of displacement. What lives and social worlds do they get to inhabit, and how do they evaluate their lived experiences? But also what survival strategies, networks of mutual care and new skills emerge in the context of precarious economic arrangements and increasingly hostile political environments? In addressing these questions my project will unpack the relationship between (forced)migration, racialization and class formation. As such my study will capture structural conditions that produce precarity, explore labor-related production of race, as well as shed light on agency of refugees, who forge possibilities and actively work on their futures. Going beyond accounts that reduce refugees to being either assets or threats, my project will document lifeworlds and full personhoods of those who sustain large sectors of Europe’s economies and make up diversity of Europe’s urban centers. From the theoretical perspective, the study will expand our thinking about refuge, and shed light on the role of migration in the making of race and class formations.