Religion, Spirituality, and the Refugee Experience in Melbourne, Australia, 1990s-2010

ISBN-13: 9781137563774 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 237 str.

Susan P. Ennis

Opis

An in-depth study of selected refugees from Ethiopia, Iraq, Somalia, and Sudan, this book examines the relationship between the refugees religious and spiritual beliefs and the refugee experience. Susan P. Ennis takes a close look at the circumstances of refugees flight, their asylum, and their initial period of settlement in Melbourne, Australia during the period between the nineteen nineties and the early twenty-first century. Ennis finds that a sense of religiosity seemed to aid the refugees, in some way, during all stages of their journey. Furthermore, nearly half of the refugees she studied reported a shift in their religiosity over the course of their emigration. Based on her research, Ennis puts forward a framework of religiosity and the refugee experience grounded in shifting typologies at each stage of the refugee journey."

Recenzje

General
Please note that I will place a number out of 10 at the beginning of each answer indicating the degree to which I am positive about what is said. By the way I do give 10s.

1) In your own words, please provide a short outline of the project.
This book proposal emanates from a successful PhD thesis involving in depth interviews with 19 refugees from basically Christian/Muslim backgrounds who have settled in Australia. The interviews appear to have been conducted at one time, requiring the time dimension of the project to be reliant on memory rather than assessments taken at different points in time. This research makes a contribution to the understanding of the process of migrant settlement for refugees from the Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia and Iraq. It carefully attends to differences in the 'home contexts', the refugee process and settlement experiences of these 19 persons. The focus is on the ways religion was or was not 'useful/helpful' in the process. Most reported that religion was of help and many found their religious practice intensified.

2) Does this proposal offer a useful and/or original contribution to the field? Is it
addressing any new/emerging areas?
Yes (6/10). It provides a window on a process that is very much at the fore in current social policy debates and concerns for social cohesion and the plight of refugees. The role of religion is often overlooked. In so far as these 19 cases are representative (and there is no way of assessing this) this is a substantial contribution to a neglected area of research which needs to be made. The secularist presupposition of social researchers in this area has long blinded them to this aspect of major social and personal processes.

3) Does it adequately engage with recent scholarship? Does it take existing
scholarship forward?
Yes (7/10), it is adequately grounded in the current literature and scholarship

4) What are the strengths and weaknesses of the proposal? You may wish to
consider structure, organization, coherence and presentation of material; scope,
coverage and breadth of appeal or degree of specialization; whether there are
any obvious omissions; timeliness and likely shelf-life of the research; what
proportion of the work, if any, will require substantial re-working; and whether
any suggested improvements fundamental to the project's success or
discretionary matters which might be addressed after the project has been
accepted.
(7/10) The strengths of this proposal rest in the careful and detailed interview material which is thoroughly mined to provide insights into the role of religion in the process of refugee settlement. It tells an intrinsically interesting story. The material is reasonably well written and in a style that is well on its way to monograph style from thesis style, but needs some further work and editing. It is a very good piece of qualitative research which is strengthened by the author's sensitivity to and capacity to interpret religious behaviour.
The weaknesses include the problem of whether the 19 cases represent anything more than themselves; the enormous detail of the analysis to be grounded in such a limited sample; the limitation of religion and spirituality to Christian and Islamic practices (this could also be seen as a 'strength' of being focussed) to the exclusion of other religious traditions and to a consideration of 'spiritual' as something other than readily recognised church/mosque related activities (that is the religion/spiritualtiy difference is referred to but underdeveloped - the obvious answer is to remove references to 'spiritual'. The references to 'theories' is well made, but they can only play an interpretive role and the data cannot be seen to be a test of them, but simply as indicative examples. But such is virtually ever the case with good qualitative research. It cannot be said that theories informed the design of the research but only the interpretation of data.
I am not convinced

Spis treści

 1. Introduction 

2. Refugees, Religion, and their Home Country Context

3. Refugees’ Religiosity in Asylum and Australia 

4. Religious Ritual and the Refugee Experience

5. Refugees and their Religious Frameworks

6. Shifts in Religiosity During the Refugee Experience

7. Patterns in Refugees’ Interaction with the ‘Other’

8. Conclusion

O autorze

Susan Ennis has coordinated and taught English language programs to newly arrived adult refugees/immigrants in Melbourne, Australia for over thirty years. She has also taught in Turkey, China (during the Tiananmen Square incident), and Cambodia (during the UN mandate).

Blurb

An in-depth study of selected refugees from Ethiopia, Iraq, Somalia and Sudan, this book examines the relationship between the refugees' religious and spiritual beliefs and the refugee experience. Susan P. Ennis takes a close look at the circumstances of refugees' flight, their asylum, and their initial period of settlement in Melbourne, Australia during the period between the 1990s and the early twenty-first century. Ennis finds that a sense of religiosity seemed to aid the refugees, in some way, during all stages of their journey. Furthermore, nearly half of the refugees she studied reported a shift in their religiosity over the course of their emigration. Based on her research, Ennis puts forward a framework of religiosity and the refugee experience based on shifting typologies at each stage of the refugee journey.