This chapter is an ethnography study of the Sahrawi people living in refugee camps in the Algerian desert. It examines the mutual perceptions and social interactions between the Sahrawi people and the humanitarians visiting them. The chapter highlights the intricate interplay of legal, spatial and political meanings variably attached to categories such as ‘nomads’, ‘refugees’, ‘citizens’ and ‘statehood’ in such perceptions and interactions. In the process, it unsettles dominant assumptions about what and who is ‘local’ and what and who is ‘global’. The chapter also problematises assumptions about the relative distribution of vulnerability and agentic power in the encounters in the Algerian desert between Sahrawi refugees and humanitarian actors mainly coming from the Global North. The latter are those in need of orientation and reassurance as they negotiate the difficult geopolitical terrain of the Algerian desert. Further, the chapter identifies and studies the tension in meanings and perceptions that marks the interactions between the Sahrawi people and the humanitarian actors visiting them: the former greet the humanitarians in their camps putting forward an image of the camps as sociospatial formations of statehood-in-waiting, while the latter experience the camps as (supposedly temporary) spaces of refuge in need of humanitarian aid.

The writing produced in workshops explored varied forms of expression including autobiography, short stories, dialect, drama, poetry and novels. There were significant debates about the nature and meaning of working-class writing and whether it had any distinctive features. Divisions between forms of writing were actively challenged and new forms of subjectivity and ways of representing experience were developed. However, there were also pressures to write within existing forms. New modes of expression could become tiring after a time when different approaches were required. Overall, writing in the Fed was marked by the creative interpretation of experience and vernacular voice. It reveals tensions between bearing witness and creative interpretation and between representing a collective social experience and the individual life story.

The writing produced by adult literacy students emerged out of a distinct educational and cultural setting. Student writing represented a significant type of learning. The writing itself tended to comprise simple and clear representations of working-class life and voices. The experience of ‘failure’ in education was a powerful one that formed the basis for personal expression. Experience was seen to put the student in control. Political issues and writing beyond the third person were also encouraged, with mixed results. In the changed context of the 1990s, new stories based on humorous episodes helped to portray students as normal rather than oppressed. Yet concern for social justice continued to inflect the writing and there were attempts to move students into the wider network of writing groups.

In this introductory chapter, the editors lay the conceptual foundations for this book. They draw on their own experiences of working on forced migration through different disciplinary approaches such as sociology and geography, and working in different parts of the world such as the Middle East and South Asia. In doing so, the authors grapple with concerns around history, theory, interdisciplinarity, and interregional dialogue that impede the advancement of forced migration studies. They lay out potential new avenues of inquiry, explaining how the different chapters, written by different authors coming from varied disciplinary backgrounds and working on different parts of the world, feed into a larger project of pushing the boundaries of conceptualising forced displacement, thus illustrating the merits of engaging in global conversations around refuge and humanitarian protection.

The learning trajectories of working-class writers reveal the importance of informal opportunities to write in workshops within a spirit of solidarity and equality. Many aspects of working-class life supported writing. Workshops provided a vital means of stimulating and supporting the aspiring writer, including domestic life, sympathetic individuals as well as participation in labour movement struggles. Writers started to read critically and share their work, with a view to making significant improvements. Some writers received structured support from cultural organisations and went on to achieve considerable success. Personal changes could be both gradual and climactic although the obstacles, both internal and external, were ever present.

This chapter explores displacement through a critical analysis of materiality and homemaking practices among internally displaced persons from Abkhazia to Georgia. Collective shelters were used by the state until 2009 to house IDPs, and were then privatized, while the status of the residents themselves remained as IDPs. The authors “analyze the experience of what happens when the status of the material shelter that forced migrants occupy change from temporary to permanent living spaces through privatization, but people’s displacement status does not change accordingly.” Despite the status change of the buildings from IDP shelters into private buildings, they continue to be seen as the IDP buildings. Their categorization as such impacts the ways in which the residents are imagined by those on the outside. The authors discuss the clashing temporalities of past lives of these structures and their current incarnations. Through a careful analysis of privatization and homemaking practices, and by bringing in this critical dimension of time, the authors offer a critical analysis of the materiality of displacement and the ways in which it affects social lives and the experiences of displacement.

The number of young people writing in London grew significantly in the 1970s and 1980s. Several key strands can be identified: the work produced around Stepney Words and the school strike leading to work on youth culture; the writing of migrants who reflected on past and present; and three longer pieces of autobiography and novels. The ways in which these young people engaged with writing revealed links to wider literary models as well as an ambiguous sense of self. Overall, they pose challenges for our understanding of the history of childhood and assumptions about maturity. Distinctions between the learning of young people and adult education reveal considerable overlap rather than a sharp distinction between the two.

The internal workings of working-class writing and publishing groups provide important insights about the nature of democracy. The attempt to form collective and co-operative groups that supported everyone led to an active remaking of educational relationships along democratic lines. The insistence upon equality between writers, irrespective of individual ability, was a cardinal principle. However, in a changing funding climate, workshops came under pressure to formalise relationships, to professionalise and to introduce management structures. This had mixed results as groups attempted to negotiate these tensions. The example of the Fed brings into question some key aspects of critical pedagogy which privileges the role of tutors and education as a whole and, in some cases, assumes that learners have internalised dominant ideas.

This chapter studies the history of Hmong refugee resettlement in the United States to examine the interplay between the refugee resettlement practices of US social service providers and failed US foreign policy in Southeast Asia during the Cold War. The author shows that practices and discourses around Hmong refugee resettlement during the last four decades have been shaped by these refugees’ relationships to legacies of imperialism and war. Specifically, the chapter shows how, in the case of the Hmong, the institutional attempt to produce “proper refugee subjects” relied on specific understandings of Southeast Asia and memories of war as well as domestic race, class, and gender relations. The author draws on postcolonial and feminist theories about the contemporary relevance of imperial pasts to argue that the social service agencies in charge of the resettlement of Hmong refugees reflected and reinforced dominant anxieties about (failed) foreign policies as well as immigration, race, welfare, and changing demographics. The chapter shows how the contentious history of Hmong refugee migration to the US is relevant for our understanding of the issues surrounding refugee crises today, in particular debates regarding security concerns in and beyond the Global North.

This chapter draws our attention to how Syrian refugee voices emerged during their migration out of Syria towards Europe. The author draws on Albert Hirschman’s paradigm of ‘Exit, Voice and Loyalty’ together with the autonomy of migration theory, subaltern studies and critical citizenship studies to engage in this analysis. She argues that limited attention is paid to the voices of migrants in transit but, by doing so, it is possible to break down the binaries between forced and voluntary migration, and contribute to the recognition of agency and political subjectivity among forced migrants. She critically interrogates the emergence of voices of refugees who have engaged in protests and turned to digital and social media to document their lives and have their voices and demands heard, revealing the myriad ways in which refugees exercise agency, challenge the structures that seek to contain and push them back and stake claims to the right to move to where they feel safe.

This chapter analyzes the complex and informal nature of refugee protection in Southeast Asia. The author specifically looks at Thailand and Malaysia and uses the discussion of Rohingya refugees to illuminate the different ways in which the state colludes with people smugglers and others in clandestinely pushing Rohingya refugees into Malaysia. The crackdown on these practices clearly reveals how deeply involved the Thai state is with these practices. The state is implicated not only in people smuggling; in analyzing the ambiguous and patchy nature of refugee protection in Southeast Asia – where there is no recognition of refugee status nor protection of it (except non-refoulement) – the author reveals how the state is also involved in the continuous marginalization and oppression of Rohingya refugees. He shows how the legality and enforcement of refugee rights differs at different scales – from the scale of the state to that of the urban. His work draws attention to the scalar nature of the law and reveals how the lack of legal frameworks creates socially and economically precarious situations for refugees.

The history of working-class writing workshops provides a fascinating example of how changes in class and the emergence of new identities were handled in cultural terms. It challenges the view that a straightforward dichotomy arose between class and other forms of identity based upon race, gender, sexuality and disability. Workshops defended their devotion to working-class writers and organisation and were wary about the involvement of middle-class people. But multiple versions of class were in play and this would be complemented by the development of women’s, black and lesbian and gay writing groups. Intense and, at times, acrimonious debates over the nature of class and identity took place. Some writers redefined class in terms of a specific identity group. As a whole, the movement held together diverse streams of activity which challenged simplistic ideas that class no longer played a role in cultural life.