Beyond resettlement as refuge: enduring and emerging dimensions of ‘displacement’ as cosmological rupture for Central African refugee women

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)The resettlement of refugees to a third country is characterised in dominant humanitarian and political discourses as a durable solution to ‘displacement.’ This thesis challenges that presumption through an ethnographic exploration of how ‘displacement’ is experienced by Central African women living in different contexts of refugee settlement in Australia and Uganda. It illustrates how, for the small number of refugees who are offered resettlement to a third country, a sense of ‘displacement’ can both endure and emerge within such settings. ‘Displacement’ is critically explored here as an embodied experience that is oriented through the subjectivities of Central African women across settings of refugee settlement in both Australian and Uganda. Through a comparative, in-depth analysis of ‘displacement’ in both contexts, the assumption that resettlement offers a durable solution of ‘refuge’ is critically unsettled. The thesis draws on 18-months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with Central African refugee women resettled across regional towns and urban settings in Australia, as well as a shorter period of fieldwork with Central African women living as refugees in Uganda. In documenting experiences of ‘displacement’ from the subjectivities of the Central African women, refugee settlement emerges here as a process that is oriented for them through cosmological logics of regenerative flow. Broader insecurities of ‘displacement’ manifest within, and are expressed through, the women’s everyday practices of cultivating plant foods, cooking food, and bearing and rearing children. In particular, it is the capacity to contribute to this regenerative flow of life through existing as ‘mother’ that is a fundamental basis of their sense of stability and ‘refuge’; or, conversely, rupture and ‘displacement.’ Subsequently, for the Central African women who participated in this research, ‘displacement’ cannot be mechanistically reduced to the socio-spatial and politico-legal shifts that are encompassed within experiences of forced migration. ‘Displacement’ is the experience of having their cosmological logics of regenerative continuity ruptured within the conditions of their settlement. The thesis thus transcends static notions of refugee ‘displacement,’ to consider instead the lived experience of being displaced as an existential condition of cosmological rupture