BERJAYA

Hi all,

As we reach the midpoint of our summer break, I’ve asked each of our AHSS summer research award winners to talk about their research projects, what they’re seeing, and what sorts of provisional conclusions or vista points they’ve found. Here’s what Tessa Samuels had to say about her fascinating and timely project:

Tessa Samuels about to conduct another interview for her summer research project.

My research seeks to determine what public schools, day-camps, and childcare facilities can do to help newly-arrived refugee families in the socialization process. With my AHSS summer research project, I hoped to bridge the communication gap between school/childcare systems and refugee families. This project was to mainly be executed through the use of semi-structured interviews and participant observation.

What I have quickly come to understand is that the families are not so concerned with the on-goings in classrooms or childcare facilities (with only one exception to date) — they face greater challenges with transportation, with understanding various rules and regulations, and with getting longer hours so as to have a little time to themselves.

All childcare workers and teachers I’ve encountered have been enthusiastically willing to accommodate cultural preferences or teachings — such as making special accommodations on Ramadan, or not serving pork to families. However, some childcare workers and teachers have faced behavioral and safety issues that they are unsure about — should they combat these behaviors? And how should they communicate with parents about these behaviors?

Moreover, many of these refugee households are headed by single mothers. Because many of these households’ challenges concern transportation and hours, there is little that the teachers and childcare facilities can do to address them. As a result, my project has shifted slightly — I’m now looking at what ways these needs can be better met, what ways childcare facilities can aid in these solutions, and how they might communicate and help with the behavioral and safety issues the encounter at these childcare facilities.

My understanding of these issues has grown tremendously. Many of the refugee families have accepted me in as almost family. I have been spending 20 – 30 hours a week in participant observation with seven different families. I’ve grown to know the troubles they face in their daily routines, the long hours they work, and their heavy reliance on public transportation to pick up their children and then get home — sometimes even after dark. I have conducted twelve ethnographic interviews and have recently begun

Public transportation is an integral feature of refugees’ quotidian existence in America

transcribing them.

And I’ve grown to realize that I’veacquired more insightful information from participant observation with the families than from these interviews! I’ve spent the majority of my time doing participant observation with these families, while I’ve conducted more formal interviews with childcare facilities and IRC workers to better understand these institutions and the refugee clientele they serve. I went into this project with the idea that this was fascinating work and something of tangible value for multiple communities, but this research has enveloped my life. I’ve developed life-changing relationships, I’ve been invited to family meals, I’ve had deep heart-to-heart conversations about the struggles of childcare in the United States, and I’ve fielded urgent late-night calls from these families.

Unknown I spend a couple hours each night writing up field notes, processing my day, and analyzing the interactions, conversations, and interviews. I’ve come to realize the deep complexity of the issue through the interviews and field notes. One major issue regards best beginnings scholarships — a state scholarship for childcare from lower income families. The complexity with best beginning scholarships is that in order to qualify for this one must be working, but to be able to work one must have childcare – so the timing and coordination between families, child care resources, and childcares has to be perfect which is challenging. Another provisional finding that has appeared in the interviews and field notes is that all families I have spoken to are so confused on why people have to pay for childcare at all in the United States. On the side of childcare facilities a common pattern in interviews is that many childcare facilitators are concerned at how desperate for help families are and that they are too trusting on handing over their children when people offer to watch them.

Two of the biggest challenges I’ve faced concern coordinating schedules with the families, and attempting to understand and translate everything I hear in interviews. Many of these refugee families speak Swahili or Tigrinya, and I need a translator to help conduct the interviews and to coordinate much of my fieldwork. This coordination has been very challenging. It’s been easier to tag along on errands and bus trainings with the translators and families, and interview them en route, although I have occasionally sat down with families for a focused interviews. Being invited into their home and having them talk freely has been an easier way to obtain genuine information and thoughts. During more formal interviews, many families are often very polite, but in participant observation and less formal settings I’m privy to the complaints and hardships these families face. Additionally, the translators I use are refugees themselves, and oftentimes

Some refugees in the region come from the DRC, transposed on a map of America to gauge its size

it’s difficult to understand everyone on my interview recordings.

I have eight more days left in the field for this project. During that time I intend tocontinue partaking in participant observation. I hope to conduct two more interviews with refugee families, and I’ve planned three more interviews with day camp staff personnel. I will continue to write field notes and analyze data in the evenings. When my fieldwork ends, I plan to compile all these data and begin to analyze those data. In that analysis, I hope to discern patterns in the conversations, complaints, and hardships these families have described to me. I hope to mark some of the best practices of the institutions involved, to point to areas of improvement, and suggest areas where better communication might be helpful, and areas where more services would be of great assistance. All of that will allow me to begin writing an ethnographic assessment of these refugees’ experiences here.

Thanks so much for the update, Tessa, and good look carrying your project to the finish line. We’ll look forward to hearing more from you as the Fall semester approaches.

Andrew

Hi all,

Early this spring I received an invitation to participate in a small international conference at INALCO — the Institut National des Langues et Civilizations Orientales in

INALCO, Paris

Paris, France. The small conference, entitled Migrants in the Globalising City: Spaces, Places and Mobilities in Asia, Europe and the Middle East, was organized by a group of scholars working with CERMOM in Paris and the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore — scholars including Delphine Pagès-El Karoui (INALCO), Brenda Yeoh (NUS), and Michiel Baas (NUS). The result was a fascinating set of papers that explored migrants’ experiences in the landscape of diverse global cities.

Thomas Maloutas and Stavros Spyrellis described the Athens Social Atlas, and then focused more precisely on how the influx of migrants and newcomers into urban Athens resulted in a vertical segregation, whereby the upper floors of buildings were held and maintained by established Greek citizens, while the lower floors were occupied by new arrivals and more itinerant and marginalized migrant populations. Yasser Elsheshtawy (who visited Puget Sound last semester) and Delphine Pagès-El Karoui revealed their efforts to provide us with the first map of segregation in the sprawling urban landscape of Dubai. Laavanya Kathiravelu (Nanyang Technological University) compared the integration of migrants in Singapore and Dubai, revealing the varying conceptualizations of ethnicity woven into the way citizenship is constructed in each of these global cities. Numerous other papers were equally fascinating.

Interstitial space in the suburban landscape of Doha, Qatar

In my own paper, I sought to articulate the concept of interstitial space, a concept I’ve been kicking around for almost a decade. In addition to simply describing this type of liminal urban space, I sought to trace its prevalence in the city, to gauge some of the historical and ideological forces that produce these in-between spaces in the landscape of the city, and to demonstrate how important this interstitial space is to the marginal components of urban society. The urban constituencies who depend on these liminal spaces include the homeless population here in Tacoma, and migrant populations in worlding cities like Doha, Qatar.

With Karen Liao (left) and Nevyne Zeineldine (right)

I was also asked by the conference organizers to evaluate and discuss two PhD candidates research progress and plans based on their preliminary fieldwork. This was a particularly energizing task. Karen Liao (NUS) has configured a project to examine and explore how architect-migrants returning to Manila both experience and reshape the city. While scholars (including those present at this workshop) have begun to think about how migrants are shaping and experiences cities, Karen presciently wants to grapple with how return-migrants interact with the cities that they departed earlier in life, and to which they often return near the end of their working life. And PhD Candidate Nevyne Zeineldine (Paris Descartes) has just returned from several months in Bahrain, where she’s grappling with how artists and the art scene there have interacted with the social movements that arose in the Arab Spring — social movements that remain somewhat active amidst the social frictions on the island. Both of these projects seem enormously promising, and I look forward to seeing their results.

“Little India” in Paris

The second day of our conference concluded at midday, and the Parisian organizers then took us on a walking tour of several of the migrant-dense neighborhoods of Paris. This was the highlight of my stay. We commenced near Gare Nord, in the neighborhood known as “Little India,” although the strong Tamilian presence there includes many of Sri Lankan ancestry. We proceeded up the hill into Goutte d’Or, where North African and Middle Eastern migrants have established a diasporic footprint in the city. We concluded by walking through the bustling street markets of Boulevard Barbès, where the African and Caribbean imprint on the city is strongest. Later that night, France beat Belgium in the World Cup semifinals, and the streets of Paris erupted in jubilation.

Andrew