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Marking Difference and Negotiating Belonging: Refugee Women, Volunteering and Employment
Author(s) -
Tomlinson Frances
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
gender, work and organization
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.159
H-Index - 73
eISSN - 1468-0432
pISSN - 0968-6673
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-0432.2008.00399.x
Subject(s) - refugee , negotiation , agency (philosophy) , diversity (politics) , construct (python library) , gender studies , sociology , multiculturalism , political science , intersectionality , face (sociological concept) , intersection (aeronautics) , inequality , work (physics) , relevance (law) , representation (politics) , politics , social science , geography , law , mechanical engineering , mathematical analysis , cartography , mathematics , engineering , computer science , programming language
Refugee women occupy a position at a neglected point of intersection of many categories of difference. This article draws on a study of pathways from voluntary work into paid employment for refugee women in the UK and reveals how they drew on these markers of difference to express and explain their experiences of exclusion or belonging. Their accounts are considered alongside those of organizational representatives, who drew on vocabularies of equality and diversity to construct refugee women as organizational outsiders or insiders. The article explores the interplay between the active agency of refugee women in negotiating the possibilities of belonging and the effect of discursive practices and structural processes that tend to perpetuate their outsider status. It concludes by briefly considering the relevance of these findings to current controversies concerning the impact of policies of managing diversity and multiculturalism on combating inequality and discrimination.