Negotiating Intimacies in a Globalized Space: Identity and Cohesion in Young Oromo Refugee Women

Abstract

This article explores the paradoxical processes in how young Oromo refugee women negotiate identity and cohesion in a globalized space. It argues that these women's experiences reveal the interplay of local and global forces of identity and cohesion. The myth that contemporary migration has diversified and expanded the pool from which people choose intimate partners is challenged, and the multiple boundaries of gender, race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and nationality interweaving in this pool of choice are critically analyzed. Implications for feminist social work practice are discussed.It has been several decades since feminists challenged the publicprivate dualism and established the notion that the personal is political. More recently, some feminists have turned this idea around, stating that the political is also personal. Along with the wider debates, feminist social work practice has been riddled with tensions between micro and macro, person and structure, identity and cohesion. Although social workers strive to

Nurturing “Critical Hope” in Teaching Feminist Social Work Research

“…Mehrotra (2010), for instance, rightly described intersectionality as "one of the most significant theoretical contributions of feminist studies" (p. 419) and called for greater attention to intersectionality in social work research and practice. Others have similarly taken up the call in their feminist social work research, troubling binary constructions like global versus local (Kumsa, 2002), essentialized categories of gender and masculinity (McKinnon, Davies, & Rains, 2001), and taken-for-granted exclusionary roles of researcher and researched (Presser, 2005). These and other social work researchers illustrate that, as Nagoshi and Brzuzy (2010) suggested, "Essentialized constructs of identity are inadequate" for the challenges faced by our field (p. 433).…”

Centering Subjectivities

“…In bringing subjectivities to the center, these perspectives urge us to situate experiences within historical and contemporary contexts and become (more) attuned to the impacts of war, displacement, and humanitarian intervention on women's internal and relational lives. As Kumsa (2002) has aptly noted in her work:…”

“…In bringing subjectivities to the center, these perspectives urge us to situate experiences within historical and contemporary contexts and become (more) attuned to the impacts of war, displacement, and humanitarian intervention on women’s internal and relational lives. As Kumsa (2002) has aptly noted in her work:Feminist social work practice has been riddled between tensions between micro and macro, person and structure, identity and cohesion…. To help negotiate an equitable space and promote social welfare, feminist social workers need an adequate understanding of the reality of the lives of these strangers who have come home to the West.…”

Suspending, settling, sponsoring: the intimate chronomobilities of young Asian migrants in Australia

“…Several scholars, however, have begun to grapple with how migrants' intimacies are often co-constitutive of their desires for (im)mobility and how intimate bonds become bound up, both legally and emotionally, in capacities to stay and to move (Geddie 2013;Lyons and Ford 2008;Madhavi 2016). Much of the literature on intimacy and mobility focuses on the stretching or reconfiguring of intimacy across space (Frohlick 2009;Kumsa 2002;Mai and King 2009;Thien 2007). This is despite a concurrent growing interest in temporality in migration studies (Cojocaru 2016;Griffiths et al 2013;Marcu 2017;Meeus 2012), which has recently challenged the primarily spatial orientations of much of the early work on migrant transnationalism.…”