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There is a growing body of feminist scholarship that highlights aspects of agency and empowerment of the refugee woman, mostly through citing examples of women challenging patriarchy and cultural norms. Extending the latter, I use a decolonizing framework to examine how refugee women strive for autonomy and empowerment through acceptingthose norms and utilizingthem strategically. In doing so, I reveal a more complex relationship between agency and victimhood and how they relate to other notions such as empowerment, vulnerability and traditional gender roles. I use the case of Syrian refugee women who marry for refugeto explore how their stories challenge Western liberal feminist views that often stigmatize similar arrangements as exploitation, sex trafficking, and/or forced marriages. The narratives of those women move beyond highlighting instances of agency, resistance, and empowerment as subversion to question the Eurocentric conceptualization of such notions. The objective of this study is three-fold: (a) reporting on and giving context to an under-research phenomenon such as marriage for refuge; (b) rethinking and challenging liberal feminist understanding of concepts such as agency, empowerment, traditional gender roles, and marriage; and (c) making the case for the potential contribution a decolonizing approach could bring to refugee research.

Structure from Motion is a pipeline for 3D reconstruction in which the true geometry of an object or a scene is inferred from a sequence of 2D images. As feature extraction is usually the first phase in the pipeline, the reconstruction quality depends on the accuracy of the feature extraction algorithm. Fairly evaluating the robustness of feature extraction algorithms in the absence of reconstruction ground truth is challenging due to the considerable number of parameters that affect the algorithms' sensitivity and the tradeoff between reconstruction size and error. The evaluation methodology proposed in this paper is based on two elements. The first is using constrained 3D reconstruction, in which only fixed numbers of extracted and matched features are passed to subsequent phases. The second is comparing the 3D reconstructions using size-error curves (introduced in this paper) rather than the value of reconstruction size, error, or both. The experimental results show that the proposed methodology is more transparent.

The current Liberal government has publicly endorsed a feminist agenda which has led to initiatives such as Canada’s feminist international assistance policy (FIAP), initiated in 2017. At the same time, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada Report (TRC) of 2015 reiterates how the histories of colonialism are still persistent and need to be addressed in our curriculum, research, and policy. This essay argues that a fully feminist agenda must be anti-colonial in nature, rejecting Eurocentric, stereotypical and universalizing explanations and leaving space for cultural interpretations, local solutions and listening to the voices of marginalized groups as experts. In short, FIAP and the TRC must be brought together in practical and policy-orientated ways to promote women’s empowerment and gender equity through a decolonizing framework. In support of Canada’s leading role in the advancement of refugee issues and the implementation of the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR), and informed by its feminist approach to foreign policy and FIAP which “comes with “aggressive” funding targets for gender equality and women’s empowerment” (CCIC, 2017), it is important to scrutinize the notion of gender empowerment and related notions, such as forced marriage and sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). Drawing on doctoral fieldwork conducted in Egypt summer of 2017, this paper uses the case of Syrian refugee women who marry ‘for refuge’ to explore how certain groups of refugee women and their stories challenge international humanitarian perceptions that often stigmatize similar arrangements as exploitation, sex trafficking and/or forced marriages. I use what I refer to as marriage for refuge and marriage immobility to demonstrate how humanitarian notions such as empowerment and related notions such as SGBV and forced marriage can be reimagined. The study aims to offer insights for a gender-responsive refugee policy that is feminist, decolonizing and sensitive to culture, context and diversity.

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