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This paper investigates the factors which influence the ability of resettled refugee parents to envisage their adolescents’ futures and support them in setting and achieving goals. It is based on the findings of a study of 10 refugee families from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East, two to three years after they had arrived in Melbourne, Australia. Analysis of the findings draws on Antonovsky’s ‘sense of coherence’ framework to highlight the conditions which assist refugee parents to negotiate their social environment and develop realistic ambitions for their families’ futures. This framework is also used to point to ways in which refugee families might best be assisted by host communities to guide and support their children and thus overcome some of the potential intergenerational conflicts which can occur following resettlement.

Resettlement is a governmental program with inherent spatial effects in that it drives the rearrangement of capital, labour, and land, and seeks to render people and space more governable. This article examines the extent to which this disruptive phenomenon has been theorised. We first review the existing literature, finding a distinct polarisation between mainstream studies and more critical scholarship. We then propose a critical geography of resettlement centred on its multiple logics, agents and expertise, and subject-making and spatial practices. An invigorated critical geography of resettlement is needed to challenge the legitimisation of an expanding resettlement industry.

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