Knowledge of the integration process for refugees is often subsumed under the broader category of “immigrants”. This book focuses on this process for refugees, including the structural and systemic challenges they face as they integrate in their new host societies, and how they respond to such challenges. The book provides a critical analysis of Canada’s approach to integrating refugees with additional chapters focused on refugee integration in Australia, Northern Ireland, and the United States. This collection of work critically addresses a range of topics and employs a variety of qualitative approaches to gain a better understanding of the lived experience of integration for refugees, including the ways in which refugees view integration and the attendant challenges and opportunities encountered during the integration process. Departing from viewing refugees as a “burden” that must be shared by the international community, the contributors to this collection explore the complex dynamics of race, class, gender, ethnicity, age, generation and legal status for refugees in a selection of local contexts of reception. The work begins a dialogue about the long-term dynamics of refugee settlement and integration with implications for the viability of future resettlement programs and practices. How the world responds to the ongoing plight of the growing numbers of displaced people will be a defining feature of the contemporary global order. This collection shifts the discourse about refugees from one of victimhood to one of refugee agency and rights. The book will be of primary interest to academics in the field of refugee and migration studies, to practitioners in the settlement sector, and to those involved in making refugee policies. It will also be useful for those who work in social services and education in countries of the global north that receive refugees and refugee claimants, and anyone with an interest in refugee lives.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315268958, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. The image we have of refugees is one of displacement – from their homes, families and countries – and yet, refugee settlement is increasingly becoming an experience of living simultaneously in places both proximate and distant, as people navigate and transcend international borders in numerous and novel ways. At the same time, border regimes remain central in defining the possibilities and constraints of meaningful settlement. This book examines the implications of ‘belonging’ in numerous places as increased mobilities and digital access create new global connectedness in uneven and unexpected ways. Belonging and Transnational Refugee Settlement positions refugee settlement as an ongoing transnational experience and identifies the importance of multiple belongings through several case studies based on original research in Australia and New Zealand, as well as at sites in the US, Canada and the UK. Demonstrating the interplay between everyday and extraordinary experiences and broadening the dominant refugee discourses, this book critiques the notion that meaningful settlement necessarily occurs in ‘local’ places. The author focuses on the extraordinary events of trauma and disasters alongside the everyday lives of refugees undertaking settlement, to provide a conceptual framework that embraces and honours the complexities of working with the ‘trauma story’ and identifies approaches to see beyond it. This book will appeal to those with an interest in migration and diaspora studies, human geography and sociology.

A collection of essays presenting new analyses of data and evidence for population and settlement patterns, particularly urbanization, in the Mediterranean world from 100 BC to AD 350.

The issues around settlement, belonging, and poor relief have for too long been understood largely from the perspective of England and Wales. This volume offers a pan-European survey that encompasses Switzerland, Prussia, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Britain. It explores how the conception of belonging changed over time and space from the 1500s onwards, how communities dealt with the welfare expectations of an increasingly mobile population that migrated both within and between states, the welfare rights that were attached to those who “belonged,” and how ordinary people secured access to welfare resources. What emerged was a sophisticated European settlement system, which on the one hand structured itself to limit the claims of the poor, and yet on the other was peculiarly sensitive to their demands and negotiations.

The stories we tell of American beginnings typically emphasize colonial triumph in the face of adversity. But the early years of English settlement in America were characterized by catastrophe: starvation, disease, extreme violence, ruinous ignorance, and serial abandonment. Seasons of Misery offers a provocative reexamination of the British colonies' chaotic and profoundly unstable beginnings, placing crisis—both experiential and existential—at the center of the story. At the outposts of a fledgling empire and disconnected from the social order of their home society, English settlers were both physically and psychologically estranged from their European identities. They could not control, or often even survive, the world they had intended to possess. According to Kathleen Donegan, it was in this cauldron of uncertainty that colonial identity was formed. Studying the English settlements at Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Barbados, Donegan argues that catastrophe marked the threshold between an old European identity and a new colonial identity, a state of instability in which only fragments of Englishness could survive amid the upheavals of the New World. This constant state of crisis also produced the first distinctively colonial literature as settlers attempted to process events that they could neither fully absorb nor understand. Bringing a critical eye to settlers' first-person accounts, Donegan applies a unique combination of narrative history and literary analysis to trace how settlers used a language of catastrophe to describe unprecedented circumstances, witness unrecognizable selves, and report unaccountable events. Seasons of Misery addresses both the stories that colonists told about themselves and the stories that we have constructed in hindsight about them. In doing so, it offers a new account of the meaning of settlement history and the creation of colonial identity.