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Summary
Baillot, H. and Vera Espinoza, M. (2025) ‘Care as resistance, care as agency, care as a burden: a relational exploration of the impact of giving and receiving care on refugees’ lives’, in G. Yurdakul, J. Beaman, L. Mügge, S. Scuzzarello, and S. Sunanta (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Intersectional Approaches to Migration, Gender, and Sexuality. 1st edn. Oxford University Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197775417.013.0017.
Abstract
This chapter discusses the multidimensionality and multidirectionality of care and its impact upon refugees’ pathways toward inclusion. Drawing on qualitative data collected during workshops and interviews with 55 recently recognized refugees in Scotland, the chapter explores how care in multiple forms is experienced, given, and negotiated. The chapter draws from ideas around care that conceptualize it as a means to resist restrictive government policies, as an expression of agency within familial and social contexts, and as a burden that affects people differentially as they seek to rebuild lives in new country contexts. In exploring the multiple dimensions and directions of care and the ways it intersects with gender and immigration status, among other social locations, we highlight conceptual and empirical parallels between care and integration. One, the text suggests, should not be understood without full consideration of the other. The chapter concludes by calling for care to be accorded a greater importance in explorations of refugees’ integration experiences, in ways that fully encompass care’s potentialities and limitations for the people who provide and receive it.
