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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Teaching The American Dream: How U.S. Refugee Resettlement Responsibilizes Refugees, Lily C. Cooper
Teaching The American Dream: How U.S. Refugee Resettlement Responsibilizes Refugees, Lily C. Cooper
Anthropology Honors Projects
My project, grounded in three months’ work and research with Jewish Resettlement Services (JRS), shows how US resettlement responsibilizes refugees through policies that teach independence and self-sufficiency while demonizing dependency. Yet, as I illustrate, refugees often want to be dependent on JRS. I combine ethnographic insights and discursive analysis to elucidate the contrasting ways in which JRS workers and refugees frame “successful” resettlement. I apply an anti-oppressive lens to show how US resettlement produces “responsible” citizens while evading its own responsibilities to properly support people whom the US has had a major role in displacing. I propose a new framework …