Susanna Snyder

Unsettled integration: Pre- and post-migration factors in Congolese refugee women’s resettlement experiences in the United States

By 2019, the United States plans to resettle approximately 50,000 refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The purpose of this study was to identify and understand the challenges, risks, and strengths of adult Congolese refugee women resettled in the United States to help policymakers, service providers, and other stakeholders prepare for the arrival of Congolese women and their families. Researchers conducted in-depth interviews and focus groups with Congolese refugee women (n = 28) and resettlement service providers (n = 29) in three US cities. The findings of this study reveal the complex and dynamic nature of Congolese refugee women’s resettlement experiences in the United States and highlight the importance of recognizing the intersection of pre- and post-migration factors during resettlement. This article offers concrete implications for the social work profession and practitioners.

Centering Subjectivities: Theoretical Considerations for Practice With Women in Forced Migration

Postcolonial feminist and African diaspora theories provide lenses through which to consider the impacts of forced migration on the internal and relational lives of women—aspects of experience less visible in policy, practice, and scholarship. Policy, practice, and research contribute to the framing of “refugees” as a static category of people irrespective of complex histories, geopolitical origins, and fluid identities impacted by structural forces. They can thus deny the subjective possibilities of women through the construction of identities that informs who refugees are and who they are expected to become. These overarching trends reflected in policy and practice have particular implications for women whose internal and relational processes remain to a large extent invisible. Drawing from postcolonial feminist and African diaspora theories, this article suggests that a practice of centering the subjectivities of women in forced migration may enhance the work of researchers and practitioners.

Looking through the Bars: Immigration Detention and the Ethics of Mysticism

Detention, a pillar of the contemporary US immigration system, has detrimental effects on those who are incarcerated, their families, and their communities. Following a discussion of immigration detention and the ways in which faith-connected groups are responding, this essay draws on twenty in-depth interviews to explore the links between these ethical practices and the Christian mystical tradition. In particular, it brings the voices of activists responding to immigration detention into conversation with the three stages of the mystical journey articulated by Dorothee Soelle—being amazed, letting go, and resisting. The essay argues that mysticism and action for social justice are intimately interwoven, and it suggests that recognition of this could enrich Christian discussion and praxis surrounding immigration.

Walking, Wounds and Washing Feet: Pedetic Textures of a Theo-Ethical Response to Migration:

Feet play a crucial role in migration, and experiences of death and hopes for new life are etched into migrants’ soles. In the face of complex and fraught ethical debates that have largely been deontological and teleological in tone, this article employs feet and footwashing as heuristic devices to suggest the need for receiving communities to develop a multi-textured virtue-based response alongside these. Cultivation of a habitus rooted in attention to bodies, service, power subversion, mutuality and confession could lead to new life both for those in migration and those long settled.

Introduction: Articulating Intersections at the Global Crossroads of Religion and Migration

This introductory chapter examines the ways in which religion and migration have intersected in scholarship and suggests ways in which studies of these intersections can be enhanced. More specifically, it reviews significant terms and concepts, proposes expanding the scope of research by attending to marginalized perspectives, and creates avenues of dialogue between different methodologies. Bringing together a variety of voices—theologians, religious studies scholars, philosophers, ethnographers, and refugees and immigrants themselves—around a range of issues related to religion and migration—conceptions of the relationship of humans to each other and to God, the religious experiences of immigrants, and the organizations involved in humanitarian aid and activism—in a number of global contexts will enable us to understand these processes more fully.

“La Mano Zurda with a Heart in Its Palm”: Mystical Activism as a Response to the Trauma of Immigration Detention

Mysticism has often been regarded as an esoteric, lofty occupation for the religiously earnest and those with spare time on their hands. Associated with gazing upwards and inwards, few have considered that it might also turn us outwards. This chapter, however, suggests that mysticism opens up possibilities for creative individual and communal responses to trauma—particularly collective trauma inflicted upon people through policies and laws—and that it can bolster resilience, spurring political and social resistance to the causes of pain. Drawing on the work of two contemporary feminist mystics, Dorothee Soelle and Gloria Anzaldua, the essay explores the possibilities that a mystical path might open up for both the oppressed and their privileged allies to engage with trauma profoundly and hopefully.

Faces of Migration: US Christianity in the Twenty-First Century

Immigration is woven into the DNA of the United States.1 From the early movements of indigenous peoples across the Bering Strait into the Americas to the arrival of Spanish and English peoples on the continent from the fifteenth century, the fates of migrants and the land now known as the United States have been intertwined. Christianity played a role in many of these journeys. Stories of faithful Puritans fleeing persecution for a New World of religious freedom—famously, the Mayflower Pilgrims from Plymouth in 1620—are embedded in the national imagination, and churchgoers were among those complicit in the forcible uprooting of Africans to work on slave plantations in the colonies.2 Today, the United States is the top migrant destination country in the world with 40 million foreign-born residents out of a population of 309 million.3 The majority of both native-born people and immigrants are Christian. In this chapter, I explore contemporary intersections between migration, migrants, and church in the United States and employ the metaphors of faces and facing to do so.

Encountering Asylum Seekers: An Ethic of Fear or Faith?

Asylum is a contentious public and political issue and people seeking asylum are often targets of fear and hostility. This article presents an ethical challenge to churches aiming to support asylum seekers in the UK. Through an exploration of two contrasting strands in the biblical tradition relating to the ‘stranger’—one rooted in an ‘ecology of fear’ and another rooted in an ‘ecology of faith’—it argues that as well as practising positive encounters with newcomers, Christians need to understand and engage with public hostility.