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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Raphaela Berding-Barwick, Professor Ruth McAreaveyORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND).
Resilience has often been used in scholarship on forced migrants to understand how they cope in the face of adversities. It is generally described as a process which is embedded into the wider social environment, and which entails the ability of individuals to respond to ongoing change. While much literature focuses on resilience-enhancing factors, advancing a more subjective understanding of resilience has been neglected. This article builds on ideas by Krause and Schmidt (2018) on the importance of different temporalities for individual agency by examining the role played by individual memories of the past, experiences in the present, and ambitions for the future in resilience processes. Using data collected during a photo-elicitation study with forced migrants in the North-East of England, it focuses on three individual accounts of resilience. Our research highlights how individuals proactively make strategic choices and assume responsibility for their own wellbeing – even if that depends on changing deeper, underlying structural issues. We go on to show that, despite a hostile immigration environment, as found in the UK, individuals are able to act and adapt to their environment, although this is limited to a degree. We show how time matters in personal resilience processes – both as a tactic for resilience for some but also as a disruptor of resilience for others.
Author(s): Berding-Barwick R, McAreavey R
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
Year: 2023
Volume: 50
Issue: 8
Pages: 1843-1861
Online publication date: 08/10/2023
Acceptance date: 18/09/2023
Date deposited: 12/10/2023
ISSN (print): 1369-183X
ISSN (electronic): 1469-9451
Publisher: Routledge
URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2023.2266146
DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2023.2266146
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