Refugee Communities: The disappearance of Voice.

The specific needs of asylum seekers/refugees are distinctive especially as they negotiate social, economic, political, geographical and imaginary boundaries, often under duress to unknown destinations, unaware of the reception that awaits them. Their journey comes with major shifts in identities and their identities become a continuous story narrated over time. Yet their sense of worth is devalued in the absence is further lowered by a media and political discourse that ascribes them with negative labels. Discourse ceases remains to be about refugees rather than with refugees and emphasis is on their bodies, as a mute and faceless physical mass. They are denied the right to present narratives that are of consequence institutionally and politically and identity determinants and discourse becomes the prerogative of Western ‘experts’: refugee lives become a site where Western ways of knowing are reproduced and their issues are framed around trauma and deficit models rather than what they represent. This chapter provides a detailed discussion on the implications of not listening to and representing the displaced’. It chronicles a consistent pattern of the filtering of a particular sort of voice of the displaced that result in a de‐politicized and de‐historicized image of refugees