| Description |
With ongoing global conflicts raging and new struggles erupting every year, humanitarian organizations and resettlement agencies must continue to generate new insight into the refugee resettlement process and empowerment programs. Refugee resettlement in the United States is organized around a well-established system of non-profit and governmental collaboration. This study takes a critical approach to exploring the social construction of empowerment, technology, and resettlement by adopting ethnographic, rhetorical field methods in order to interrogate the in situ discourses and practices that participate in the social construction and embodiment of empowerment. Further, the critical implications of this study suggests that empowerment should be approached from a more inclusive stance, challenging the hegemonic valorization of economic independence, entrepreneurialism, and ableism implicated within empowerment rhetoric. Chapter 4 discusses the ways that discourses and practices create tensions in resettlement organizations, while Chapter 5 identifies the ways that empowerment representations assist and resist economic-centered representations that reinforce the importance of global imperial capitalism. Finally, this study outlines a crystalline view of empowerment that embraces emergent, lived tensions, and contingent performances of empowerment. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattaris (1987) rhizomatic approach and Tracy and Tretheweys (2001) crystallized identity, crystalline empowerment is a metaphor for the organic, perspectival, and nonlinear texture of a more productive conceptualization of empowerment. In sum, viewing empowerment as tension filled and multifaceted provides a practical vocabulary that acts as a starting point for conceptualizing alternative goals and interpretations of successful resettlement. |
