Family reunion and refugee integration
Join this event to hear Andrea Verdasco discuss how refugee mothers negotiate ‘deservingness’ in the east of England and their experiences of everyday life after reunification with family members.
Andrea's research investigates the experiences of refugee mothers who have been separated and reunited from their children, spouses, or other family members. Her research aims to unravel how family relations and motherhood are transformed when refugee families are reunited, and how families are reconfigured.
In this seminar, she will present some preliminary findings on how refugee women who arrive to the east of England negotiate everyday life and access to rights with different actors, including welfare state bureaucrats and advocacy actors. She will share some of the ethical dilemmas that have risen during the fieldwork and also explore some of the emerging themes around notions of loss, abandonment, and new forms of kinship.
This in-person event will be particularly useful for those interested in welfare, migration, refugee mothers, family, transnational families and family reunification.
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Her research interests lie in how refugee families, especially mothers and children, experience everyday lives in their new host countries, and how they construct and negotiate belonging, identity, and social relations.
Her work is grounded in ethnographic methods through participatory approaches; to date she has conducted fieldwork with migrant youth and families in Mozambique, Denmark, and England.