Finding home in the other : newcomers' experiences of making home and integration in Amsterdam East

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Finding Home in the Other

Newcomers’ experiences of making home and integration in Amsterdam East

MSc Cultural and Social Anthropology

Applied Anthropology Track

Graduate School of Social Sciences

Student: William Thomas Lindsay Student Number: 11586168

E-mail: williamlindsay92@gmail.com Word Count: 29,012

Supervisor: Dr. Laurens Bakker 2nd Reader: Dr. Yatun Sastramidjaja 3rd Reader: Dr. Francio Guadeloupe Date of submission: 7 August, 2018

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Acknowledgements

I wish to foremost extend my deepest gratitude to the newcomers I met at BOOST, whose stories were told to me in confidence and trust. I would not have gained as rich of a perspective as I did had it not been for your kindness and always-present willingness to help in creating this thesis. Next, I give thanks to BOOST as an organization, along with its staff and volunteers. They made it possible for me to undergo first-hand participant observation by enrolling me in the Dutch courses, participate in Taal Café to the end of learning Dutch, and be nourished by their daily lunches.

Next, I want to give the most affectionate of thanks to my life-partner Kira, who accompanied me to another continent and fostered a sense of home whose haven sheltered me from the darkest of times and instilled within me a confidence born from unwavering support.

Thirdly, I extend thanks to organizations outside of BOOST such as Wereldhuis for reminding me that the strength of a community lies within its diversity.

Lastly, I metaphorically give thanks to the city of Amsterdam whose gezellig cafés housed me and diverse inhabitants that drew me to this country in the beginning.

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Plagiarism Declaration

I have read and understood the University of Amsterdam plagiarism policy. I declare that this assignment is entirely my own work, all sources have been properly acknowledged, and that I have not previously submitted this work, or any version of it, for assessment in any other paper.

William Lindsay

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Abstract

This thesis aims to explore how refugees at an integration-oriented community center in Amsterdam East called BOOST Amsterdam conceptualize the idea of home, and experience barriers and opportunities to integration. Further, position of BOOST in the non-governmental organization community is mapped out, as well as their role in the newcomers’ lives. In our age of uprootedness, ground-level research is critical to understand the experiences of newcomers. This thesis’ theory is partly informed by the New Zealander Anthropologist named Michael Jackson, whose work with the Warlpiri people of central Australia is foremost about how home is experienced. “Home”, posits Jackson, “is grounded less in a place and more in the activity that occurs in the place”. My research likewise holds a relational conception of home. The daily experiences of integration will also be discussed from the perspective of newcomers. The conceptual framework for integration is based on the British psychologists Alastair Ager and Alison Strang who identify four markers and means of integration. They are referred to as such because each factor is can act both as a signifier of successful integration, and a means to achieve it. These markers and means are employment, housing, education, and health. This thesis also describes the barriers to making home, and inversely the opportunities and circumstances that facilitate making home. This research features elements of Participatory Action Research (PAR), which focuses on the importance of local knowledge and cogenerative learning as means to accomplish a mutually beneficial outcome for both the researcher and research population. In the spirit of PAR, one of the goals of this research will be for evidence-based and informed policy recommendation to be provided for BOOST. Appropriately, the discussion of these recommendations to will be addressed at the conclusion of this thesis.

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Introduction

The concept of home in my life has been historically elusive. As a result of my own past being pockmarked by frequent relocation, my ties to a western-centric idea of a home has been fleeting. The title of this essay reflects the revelation I had about how I came to define my own sense of belonging. My definition of home almost wholly disregards a city, or even a country. Rather, in my occasionally-tumultuous past I have made home most easily by meeting new people and breaking bread with the “other”; spending time with people whose lives, histories, and identities often contrast my own. My own complex relationship with this concept fostered a fertile ground, out of which grew my formalized curiosity of the subject.

At the time this thesis was finished, I had lived in the Netherlands for just shy of one year. Based on my later-described framework for integration and my own opinion, I do not consider myself as an integrated member of Amsterdam. I had, however, found a sense of home in the most unlikely of places: BOOST Amsterdam. It is here that I gained the ability to

communicate in Dutch, which equipped me with the means to make connections with an exponentially broader demographic. Most telling of these connections were with newcomers themselves at BOOST, whose relationships would not have been as deep had it not been for our shared language of Dutch and occasionally English. I theorized that this unique population had a similarly complex conception of home, and their experiences of integration were worth

exploring. Such perspectives offer a glimpse into the lives of these people that can sometimes be overlooked when resettlement policies are implemented and when organizations serving this demographic are in operation. In pursuit of learning about these experiences, I postulate my primary research question: How do newcomers at an integration-oriented community center in Amsterdam East conceptualize home and experience barriers and opportunities to integration? My interest in refugees was first piqued when I volunteered with a youth refugee organization in Salt Lake City, Utah. At a center named Hser Ner Moo1 I acted as a peer mentor and helped lead discussions and workshops on cultural exchange, language, health, and civic engagement in an after school program. The aim of this program was to help youth refugees overcome language, cultural, and educational barriers encountered during resettlement. I frequently found myself wanting to learn more about the home lives of these children, and dig deeper into their resettlement experiences after a few glimpses into their struggles, including an instance of

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violence that broke out between two children. One evening during volunteer hours, we were holding a painting activity for children when two teenagers began brawling. To my surprise, neither the floor manager for Youthlinc nor other volunteers did anything to separate the fight. Out of instinct, I jumped in and pulled them apart; at the expense of staining my hands and shirt with blood. Near the end of my time with the program, I was asked to act as a cultural broker between coordinators and young refugees. This request stemmed from incidents of disciplining students for bad behavior. The discipline that was administered proved ineffective, and blame was placed on a mutual misunderstanding of cultural definitions of punishment. I ultimately did not accept this duty due to my continuing pursuit of other ventures.

This trajectory led me into the global theater to dedicate my research to uncovering the lived experiences of integration from the perspectives of those impacted most directly. My passion for working with these vulnerable populations was compounded after reading Joel Robbins’s work titled Beyond the suffering subject: toward an anthropology of the good early in my thesis design stage. In his essay, he offers critique of anthropology’s paradigm shift

throughout the study’s history and concludes how “some diverse recent trends in anthropology focused on such topics as value, morality, well-being, imagination, empathy, care, the gift, hope, time, and change might change in the future coalesce in another shift of anthropological

attention, this one toward an anthropology of the good capable of recovering some of the distinctive critical force of an earlier anthropology without taking on many of its weaknesses” (Robbins, 2013: 448). I consider ground-level research of refugees to be critically important as a means of knowledge generation. To borrow the term coined by Greenwood and Levin, John Van Willigen (2002: 80) calls this process cogenerative learning. This process of knowledge

generation “was promoted as a way to work against the ‘professional expert model’”, which is the power-laden relationship between researcher and research population that places the dominant authority of knowledge on the researcher. Instead, cogenerative learning shifts this relationship to place a greater emphasis on the importance of local knowledge and its legitimacy (Van Willigen, 2002: 78). This is explained in greater detail in section 1.5.1. I wish to make it clear that I do not claim to portray panoptic definitions of home and integration, nor do I intend to cheapen the rich expanse of individual and collective experience held by newcomers. To write otherwise would risk short-sightedness at best, and anecdotal profession of facts at worst. I will, however, offer a critical and ethnographic account of the dynamic and sometimes chaotic lives of

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newcomers at BOOST. I am doing so because this period in history is, of many things, one of uprootedness. At BOOST I held a meeting with staff members and newcomers who contributed to my research to present a less-academic version of my research findings. In this meeting, I expressed the necessity of this kind of research because of the direction the world is moving. I was quickly interrupted by the coordinator who pointed out the fact that the “world of uprooted movement” is already here, and we are living in a time that has already been impacted by

migration and will continue to be subject to the challenges it brings. In the case of resettlement, I consider the generating of knowledge about the experiences of those resettling to be of

paramount importance. In short, the goal of this thesis is to bring to the fore how newcomers conceptualize home, experience the processes of making home and integration (both their barriers and how they can be overcome), and describe the role of BOOST as a community organization throughout these processes. This thesis will ideally be a useful reference for policy makers, community organizations, newcomers, and populations who are subject to receiving migrant groups by considering the perspectives of a group of newcomers who are living the sometimes-abstract, but always-felt concept of integration. Lastly, each person’s name

mentioned in this thesis has been replaced with a pseudonym for the sake of anonymity and to help uphold their safety and respect their privacy.

The Netherlands was widely hailed as a bastion of multiculturalism throughout history. That is, until this recent decade. Dutch political sociologist Maarten Vink outlines a history of Dutch policy for immigration in his work titled Dutch Multiculturalism: Beyond the Pillarisation

Myth. Multiculturalism began to fall in the wake of the September 11th attack in the United States. I should say that the attack acted more as a catalyst, because Vink states that the attack “radicalized a discourse of ‘new realism’ that had been developing for over a decade” (Vink, 2007: 339). More to the present, the Civic Integration Act was adopted in 2006. This act requires both old and new immigrants to take a civic integration exam. This signals a new age of civic integration in the Netherlands, which puts more personal responsibility on the immigrant for integration. The above note is meant to give a very shortened and narrow overview of Dutch legal information on integration. As functions and effects of the state lie beyond the scope of this thesis, they will not be described further.

Chapter 1 will discuss the literature and applicable theory that were used to inform my thesis. This chapter contains conceptualizations of making home, dwelling, and integration and

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introduces the idea of home as transnational; that is, decoupling the idea of home being defined as one country or another. Following this, I delve deeper into integration framework and operationalize associated terms used throughout this essay. I then address the research question about how newcomers conceptualize home by introducing some key informants describe their respective ideas of home. The chapter ends with a discussion of what methods were employed during fieldwork and my positionality within BOOST during this period. Lastly, I address how Participatory Action Research shaped my practices during fieldwork and methods of data-generation. Chapter 2 begins with an explanation of the five themes of making home and how they are associated with the domains of integration explained in section 1.3. Next are the ethnographic accounts of newcomers who describe what barriers to making home that they experience while living in the Netherlands. After these stories are a collection of processes that newcomers underwent in order to overcome many barriers they faced. The final chapter

discusses BOOST’s position within the non-governmental organization community in Amsterdam, what role this organization plays in newcomers’ lives, and contains a discussion with various parties about their respective conceptualizations of integration. The last section of chapter 3 discusses the resources that newcomers feel they lack, and what problems exist according to BOOST. This chapter also contains a list of policy recommendations for BOOST founded on my research at their organization.

My fieldwork site is an integration-oriented meeting place called BOOST Amsterdam, located in Amsterdam East. One of the first striking impressions I had at BOOST was from their use of the term “newcomer”. Among the terms commonly heard in media and everyday speech is “refugee”. Few of us escape hearing headlines about the latest refugee crisis. Delving into

literature associated with my topic, I saw that the terms we use to label this unique population ranges widely; from refugees, migrants, asylum seekers, to border crossers. While my thesis design was in its infancy, I read an article from a recent graduate in my department from the University of Amsterdam who had just finished her thesis the summer prior. In her Master thesis titled To cure sometimes, to relieve often, to comfort always, Rozemijn Aalpoel deliberately opted to use the term “border crossers” when referring to her study population. In her work, she uses this term “to refer to those who crossed the Aegean in small boats”, and notes that “Not every border crosser, however, belongs to one of these sometimes excluding and deserving categories” (Aalpoel, 2017: 11). She makes a point to address what terminology is used, showing

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the importance of labels and terms assigned to these groups. This critical position is taken also by Zorg Café (Care Café). Speaking to their coordinator at BOOST, we discussed the

implications in this labelling of groups. She posed her own questions:

“What makes it so difficult that makes you a refugee? Is it a dirty word? Of course, you remain ‘Ahmed’, but you of course have a refugee background. You have a political background with it. It’s a personal experience. You fled your country, you can’t deny it. But of course it’s also something with social media and the news, how do you call the group who came here in 2015 standing in mass in front of the borders? It is that group that came here. You are not yet a Dutch citizen. You don’t speak the language. Is it allowed to give that group a name?”

Interview with Zorg Café Coordinator at BOOST, March 2018

I found the near-ubiquity of the term newcomer at BOOST to be curious, because the boundaries for whom is included in this group was not immediately clear. To shed some light on this, I posed a seemingly-simple question to many people at BOOST: Who is a newcomer?

I began my search for answers among the population the term most obviously applies to, which are the people from outside the Netherlands who are using BOOST’s services. At first, my question was not clearly understood. My question was often met with a quizzical look, followed by a request for clarification. I decided to instead create a group discussion of the topic during

Taal Café (Language Café). Because the topics were often fluid and the Taal coaches would

frequently ask what we wanted to talk about, this was a convenient and comfortable medium to pose my out-of-context inquiries. However, once I asked the participants what the term means and who is considered a newcomer, they became uneasy or disinterested. The Taal coach (who was present at this table of newcomers) replied vluchtelingen zijn nieuwkomers (refugees are newcomers). He continued to say that it was an easier and nicer term for refugees. A man, whose name will be Nathan, then joined the conversation and said that he feels like a Nederlander (Dutch citizen) because he has a home and is employed. He followed with “It doesn’t make me any different from Dutch people”. In contrast, Nathan’s youngest nephew interjected, saying that that he doesn’t feel like a Nederlander because he has only lived in the Netherlands for a year and couple months. While he is in a school to learn Dutch, he is not employed. This interaction added one piece of the puzzle: There is a time component involved with who is considered a newcomer. This was later reinforced by others referring to me as a newcomer. I initially didn’t

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consider it an accurate label, but realized that at the time of my fieldwork, I had only lived in the Netherlands (and the whole of Europe, for that matter) for only six or seven months.

I later brought my question to the coordinator of Zorg Café during an interview. I posed a more specific question to her: What are the boundaries for the term newcomer, who is and who isn’t? She started by echoing my statement from the beginning of this section about how anyone who fled their home is often called a refugee. However, she clarified, you’re only a refugee if your request for asylum is accepted. She provided me with a paper that outlines the distinctions between asylum seekers and status holders. At BOOST, they do not exclude people based on their legal status. In fact, there are people from across the “migrant spectrum” who attend: Asylum seekers, refugees, failed asylum seekers/undocumented people, and even immigrants who did not flee their country at all who do not qualify as any of the three categories above. She explained:

“When you see a person during the consulting time, it’s not the first question you ask ‘Are you an asylum seeker or...?’ the problems remain the same. So, let’s call them all newcomers. People are new in the Netherlands. Whether you’re an asylum seeker or a status

holder, you’re new here, you have to find your way; you have to integrate. Even if you come from America, you are a newcomer.”

Interview with Zorg Café Coordinator at BOOST, March 2018

Zorg Café has adopted such an inclusive policy, however at some point it is necessary to ask people what their legal status is for the sole purpose of determining their rights and what kind of care they qualify for. Using the label newcomer is nicer than, for example, referring to everyone as their actual legal status like asylum seeker. Another distinction she made was that if someone has been in the Netherlands for under a year, they’re still considered to be a newcomer. “As part of a bigger debate,” she concludes “we should distinguish the groups we’re talking about.” In sum, the term newcomer is an inclusive label that includes asylum-seekers, non-status holders, refugees, and other migrants who have lived in the Netherlands for under one year. For the scope of this thesis, this term will be utilized as outlined above; however paying no regard to the time that one has spent in the Netherlands.

I first met with a coordinator at BOOST in October, 2017 to discuss their organizational aims and my research interests. I learned about the variety of activities that are held there, and that many of the organization’s aims are towards language education. As a way to grasp a better

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understanding of the organization, I began volunteering as an English tutor shortly after our initial meeting; well before my research formally began. My field site consisted of two large buildings facing one another in the quiet, tree-lined neighborhood of Transvaal in Amsterdam East. There is a bridge connecting the two buildings consisting of the second and third floors. The first floor of the main building consists of two large rooms, and restrooms. The first of these rooms feature the bar and the kitchenette, where visitors can enjoy free tea and coffee. Natural light fills this room, with several windows behind the bar in the place of a brick wall. Beside the bar area is the kitchen complete with a full industrial refrigerator, oven, and burners. There are several tables in this area, and serves the purpose as a meeting point or place to leisurely enjoy your morning coffee before Dutch lessons. The other room on this floor is filled with tables and a couple of couches in one corner, and is similarly bathed in natural light. This room’s primary function is to host newcomers and volunteers for Taal Café and daily lunches on weekdays. In the corner is a table for Zorg Café, where medical professionals and volunteers from the Red Cross and Dokters Van de Wereld (Doctors of the World) who help connect newcomers with the Dutch health care system and GPs. This room is additionally used to facilitate non-BOOST related events such as the weekly meal on Monday evening’s from BuurtBuik (Neighborhood Belly, literally translated); a non-profit organization that seeks to minimize food waste by collecting excess food from supermarkets, greengrocers, and catering companies and sharing it with local residents. The second floor houses offices for staff, meeting rooms, the library, and classrooms. The majority of space on the third floor is a massive gymnasium that is used for public receptions with the municipality, various other organizations and partners, and as an indoor football field on Tuesday evenings. Other rooms on this floor is used as an art studio for drawing and painting lessons. Newcomers who go to BOOST are from a myriad of countries. The most represented country is Syria, however there are many people from Eritrea, Iran, and Iraq. There are other individuals who hail from such countries as Morocco, Jordan, Sudan, and Mongolia. There is a broad age range of newcomers, from around age 8 to 70. As follows, the languages spoken at BOOST are as diverse as its participants. It is not uncommon to have overhear a conversation featuring two or even three distinct languages. Dutch is the most encouraged language, especially during language classes and Taal Café.

There are a series of subquestions that guided my greater research question. To start, I gathered information from newcomers about what their personal idea of home is, and what

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factors contributed to this mental construction. Because I suggest that home is relational; following from Jackson (1995) conceptualization, I decidedly gathered the information from newcomers directly about their personal mental constructions of home. Secondly, I listened to stories about newcomers’ experiences of barriers to making home and feeling at home, and inversely what opportunities did they have that facilitated the process of making home. Ager and Strang’s (2008) organize the markers and means to integration as employment, housing, health, and education. I therefore gathered information from newcomers about what barriers and opportunities exist to making home; including barriers and opportunities to reaching the above markers of integration. Thirdly, I asked newcomers, coordinators, and other volunteers how they conceptualize integration. To get a more complete picture of integration, I asked various parties at BOOST about what they consider integration to be. Many people at BOOST consider

integration to be simultaneously a process and an end-goal, so I followed up with questions about how integration can be achieved. BOOST is a unique meeting space that fosters contact between local neighborhood residents and newcomers, so I cannot ignore integration’s influence in people’s lives. Lastly, I sought to learn about BOOST’s focus on integration, and how it meets newcomers’ needs of making home and what resources are provided. In doing so, I was able to better understand BOOST’s position in newcomers’ lives, what resources they provide, and, according to newcomers, what BOOST needs to improve.

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Chapter 1: The relationship between making home and integration

1.1: Making Home, Dwelling, and Integration

This thesis’s theory is partly informed by the New Zealander Anthropologist named Michael Jackson, whose work with the Warlpiri people of central Australia is foremost about how home is experienced. “Home”, posits Jackson, “is grounded less in a place and more in the activity that occurs in the place” (Jackson, 1995: 147). My research likewise holds a relational conception of home. He purports that it can, however, be found through “describing the lived relationship suggested by the phrase being-at-home-in-the-world” (Jackson, 1995: 122, original emphasis). I also invoke British Anthropologist Tim Ingold’s relational conceptualization of home. Chapter ten of his book The Perception of the Environment: Essays on livelihood,

dwelling, and skill discusses house and home from a dwelling perspective. Ingold interprets the

German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s definition of dwelling as “the forms that people build, whether in the imagination or in the ground, arise within the current of their involved activity, in the specific relational contexts of their practical engagement with their surroundings” (Ingold, 2000: 186). This thesis seeks to uncover how home is imagined, and subsequently constructed, by newcomers and detail their experiences during such a process. There are numerous domains of home, and the use of home as an idea is multidisciplinary, with roots in disciplines ranging from human geography, psychology, and to anthropology (Mallett, 2004: 64). In Shelley

Mallet’s review of affiliated literature of understanding home, she states that “home is variously described in the literature as conflated with or related to house, family, haven, self, gender, and journeying” (Mallet, 2004: 62). In the section titled Home/journeying, she explains the unique case of migrants, including refugees, in making home. More applicably to my research with newcomers is her distinction of how home is conceptualized by migrants: “Accordingly the conditions under which people leave their homelands, their journeys beyond and away from home and their destinations are all said to impact on their identity and understanding of home” (Mallet, 2004: 78).

1.2: Home as Transnational

Home can also be viewed as a country. However, the nationalistic view of home is challenged in the Canadian historian Alexander Freund’s work with refugees in Winnipeg, Canada. In his work titled Transnationalizing Home in Winnipeg: Refugees’ Stories of the Places

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their experiences of “making home” throughout their lives. The focus is less on, for example, from Syria to Canada, but rather exploring how the refugees’ notions of home were constructed in all the places between their home country and Canada. This provides a respite from the “dichotomous ‘here-or-there’ conceptualization of home” that dominates modern migration discourse (Freund, 2015). Freund states that his use of transnational has two meanings. It means that refugees’ process of making home is informed by their past experiences of making home in other localities. Their process of making home in Canada was done by “drawing experiences, stories, practices, traditions, and memories of homes elsewhere, both in countries of origin and in countries along the migration route” (Freund, 2015: 62). Second, says Freund, “that the nation-state was never the only or most-important point of reference for making home” (Freund, 2015: 62). His interviews instead point to other factors below the national level. Factors such as family, kin, neighborhood, and food were either equally or more important than the nation-state.

Consistent with Freund’s data, my interviewees likewise placed less emphasis on the state or location, but rather on such factors as creating a social network with local people, maintaining family relationships, equal treatment, freedom to live one’s life, and living in peace. It would be limiting to consider the newcomers’ processes of making home only in their current spatial context. The following story is a rare and gripping look into the journey of a Syrian man and his tumultuous sojourn to the Europe.

“I went to Turkey, I crossed the Syrian border. I went directly a coastal city at the Mediterranean Sea. I stayed there about 10 days or more till we met a smuggler, and we paid him, and we crossed also the sea to a Greek island. We were about 40-45 people on the boats. My sister fled

before me, I was alone. My sister lived in Aleppo, and I lived in Damascus. So I stayed on the island for a couple of days. Then I took a ship to Athens and stayed there for a couple of days, three or five days. Then I took a bus with a group of Syrian people, refugees, to a train station on

Macedonia. We stayed there for three days. We took a train directly to the Serbian border. We crossed it on foot, we walked a lot. It took maybe a few days. We couldn’t let the border guards or police to see us or catch us. It took about two or three days to reach a city in Serbia. It’s called,

I don’t remember, but it’s a small town there. We booked at ticket to the capital of Serbia. We took a bus and we stayed there for about a week. We also called a smuggler to help us cross the

Hungarian border. It was really hard to cross it. There were lots of CCTV and thermostat cameras. Heat sensing cameras. They brought us a van. We sat in the small van, there were about 20-25 people. We were stuffed. It was really hard, and we were really close to each other.

We got squeezed. Then we managed to cross the Hungarian border, and directly to Austria. It was a dangerous trip. I stayed there for about two days, in a small hotel with some other Syrian refugees until we managed to meet a smuggler there in order to take us to the Netherlands in a

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car; directly from Austria to the Netherlands. Then I turned myself in at the first asylum seeker’s center in the Netherlands.”

Interview with Tony at a café in Amsterdam Centrum, January 2018

Above is the shortened version of a harrowing experience suffered by a single newcomer. While the focus of my research is on experiences of making home and integration after they have arrived in the Netherlands, one would do well not to discount the heartbreaking and complex troubles many of these people have faced, and often worse are the stories of those who did not make it to Europe. To relate this back to the discussion of categorizing home as transnational, in her section titled Home/journeying, Mallett (2004: 77) quotes the Czech philosopher Aviezer Tucker, who stressed that “Home-searching is a basic trait of human nature, one which arises out of the propensity of humans to migrate as a means of ensuring their survival”. People who undertake such migrations, as in the case of those fleeing their countries, do so precisely as, among other things, a means of ensuring their survival. We should focus less on, for example, life in Eritrea vs. life in the Netherlands. Rather, as social scientists we should be open to the processes and conceptualizations of home in spaces between their home country and the country in which they now reside.

1.3: Integration

The concept of integration, while hotly debated in the social sciences, is a functional term employed by BOOST. When asked what integration is, the Italian-Dutch coordinator at BOOST replied that “integration means contact”. She pressed the importance of community involvement in building social connections and professional networks. Dutch citizens in the surrounding neighborhood help newcomers in a myriad of ways. These ways can be material, such as providing toiletries or food. They can also be knowledge based, like teaching Dutch to newcomers. Their contribution is likewise social in nature, the neighborhood is involved and enables newcomers to meet people. To capture the essence of BOOST in a motto: “Vluchtelingen

& buurtbewoners werken samen aan integratie” (Refugees and neighbors working together on

integration). The British psychologists Alastair Ager and Alison Strang provide a conceptual framework for integration. While this is the singular model of integration I refer to in this essay, I am confident in the strength and validity of this framework due to its meta-analytical attributes. The foundation of Ager and Strang’s (2008) study is from the Indicators of Integration study commissioned by the UK Home Office in 2002. The above-mentioned study was part of a

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greater evaluation of the effectiveness of the Challenge Fund (CF) and European Refugee Fund (ERF) projects across the United Kingdom (Ager and Strang 2008: 166). Within the greater debate of integration, this framework is situated in such a way to provide a structure for

considering what key components exist that constitute integration. Other scholars openly engage with the fluidity of integration as a concept. Ager and Strang (2008: 167) cite others who claim “‘integration’ is a chaotic concept: a word used by many but understood differently by most.” Inspired by the next quote, the foundation of my ethnography is based on the individual and self-reported experiences with integration: “[integration is] individualized, contested and contextual” (ibid.). The authors identify four markers and means of integration. They are referred to as such because each factor is can act both as a signifier of successful integration, and a means to achieve it. These markers and means are employment, housing, education, and health (Ager and Strang, 2008: 169).

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While this is a useful framework that can be utilized by various parties, such as policy makers, NGOs, and newcomers themselves, they can sometimes overlook individual experiences of integration. To fill this gap, my research explored how newcomers at BOOST conceptualize the idea of home and how they subsequently make home, and experience integration on a daily basis. There are a series of subquestions that guided my greater research question. To start, I gathered information from newcomers about what their personal idea of home is, and what factors contributed to this mental construction. Secondly, I listened to stories about newcomers’ experiences of barriers to making home and feeling at home, and inversely what opportunities did they have to “ease” the process of making home. Thirdly, I asked newcomers, coordinators, and other volunteers how they conceptualize integration. Because many consider integration to be simultaneously a process and an end-goal, I followed up with questions about how integration can be achieved. BOOST is a unique meeting space that facilitates contact between local

neighborhood residents and newcomers, so I cannot ignore integration’s influence in people’s lives. Lastly, I sought to learn about BOOST’s focus on integration, and how it meets

newcomers’ needs of making home and what resources are provided. 1.3.1 Integration facilitators

In Michael Jackson’s (1995) book, he underwent a revelation and realized that to be at home is to “experience a complete consonance between one’s own body and the body of the earth. Between self and other.” He concludes with the statement that “The relationship is all.” (1995: 110, original emphasis). This viewpoint can be understood from Ager and Strang’s (2008: 178) discussion on the facilitators to remove barriers to integration, which are social connections. These are characterized by social bridges, social bonds, and social links. Social bridges signify the connection of refugees to their host communities, including refugee participation in host societies. Both refugees and non-refugees share the notion that the friendliness of people they encountered on a regular basis as an important factor in making them feel at home (Ager and Strang, 2008: 180). This finding is shared by Joyce and Liamputtong (2017: 18), whose research on young Congolese refugees carried out in regional areas of Australia found that young

Congolese “…relied on social support from their friends, family, and ethnic community and the wider regional community to cope with these issues”. Social bonds are defined as the ties one has with their own ethnic group. During the fieldwork stage of Ager and Strang’s data collection (2008: 178), refugees “valued proximity to family because this enabled them to share cultural

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practices and maintain familiar patterns of relationships.” The third feature of social connections is social links. This is defined as the relationship between the refugee and individuals and

structures of the state; such as government services (Ager and Strang, 2008: 181). For example, a refugee’s lack of knowledge about their locality led to barriers to integration. This, in turn, calls for extra effort from the refugees and local people in order to facilitate refugees’ access to services. Strang, Baillot, and Mignard (2017) published a case study of refugees in Glasgow, Scotland. Among their findings, a long delay in public assistance was found for new refugees. They cite a number of reasons for the delay, starting with individuals not applying for benefits promptly. In the case of the authors, it was because the refugees were not informed of the

urgency of prompt application (Strang, Baillot, and Mignard, 2017: 7). The authors outline more examples of failures in what Ager and Strang (2008) classify as social links that led to

sanctioning, denying of agency, and access to housing (Strang, Baillot, and Mignard, 2017: 8). 1.3.2 Removing barriers to integration

Among the challenges faced by newcomers that I encountered can be characterized under Ager and Strang’s description of barriers to integration: Language knowledge, cultural

knowledge, and safety and security. Language is commonly cited as an expectation of refugees, and central to integration. I will begin with a brief caveat about determinants of second language. The Dutch sociologist Frank van Tuburgen studied the factors that contribute to an increased likelihood of second-language proficiency. To condense his findings, he found that staying in a reception center for a prolonged period decreases second language proficiency, as does

experiencing physical and mental health problems. Arriving in the host country at a younger age, moving from a larger city, completing an integration course, participating in a volunteer

organization, high pre-migration education, long settlement intentions, and length in the country are all determinants of increased second language acquisition (van Tuburgen, 2010).

Ager and Strang (2008) highlight the value of broader cultural knowledge in integration. A newcomer’s cultural knowledge of a new host location can be key when making home. From my personal experiences with both international students and refugees, they can experience a sense of exclusion when they do not understand host culture. For example, during an interview with Kent at BOOST I was told that dating is difficult in Amsterdam. I understand this to be because of different cultural practices of love. The second barrier is safety and stability. Perceiving an area as unsafe can lead to feelings of marginalization and exclusion, often

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resulting in individuals being socially reclusive. When this is not the case, Ager and Strang’s community interviews showed that “Refugees felt more ‘at home’ in their localities if they saw them as peaceful, while non-refugees were often concerned that new arrivals did not cause unrest in their community” (Ager and Strang, 2008: 183).

1.4: How do newcomers conceptualize home?

In this section I will introduce most of my informants that will be referred to throughout this thesis and describe the responses of the respondents when asked about what their

conceptualization of home is. In doing so, I aim to answer a key part of my research question: How do newcomers conceptualize home? The maiden interview of my fieldwork was with an English student of mine, whose name will be Tony. He was one of the first students I had when I began tutoring advanced English at BOOST. He is a Kurd from Syria with an educational

background in Law. He is highly proficient in English, and desires to obtain TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) certification. His education from Syria is not recognized by Dutch universities, and therefore must begin his study anew. I should also note that he is multilingual and speaks Arabic, Kurdish, Turkish, English, Dutch, and a bit of German. While both his English and Dutch skills transcend conversational, he must pass language exams to attend a university in the Netherlands. At the time of the interview, he had been in the

Netherlands for about two and a half years. I asked him about what makes somewhere a home. He replied:

“First of all, people. When you feel that you are accepted by people, when you sit with them and talk with them, you feel like home. When you feel like that you’re not a stranger or a foreigner

here. People treat you equally, and want to get closer to you. Then you feel home. Also when you learn the language, you start speaking Dutch with people, you feel like you’re closer to them.

You’ll feel really home; the people the language.”

For Tony, home is made by the relationship between himself and others. In this case, specifically with the local population. He would feel at home if he could make more connections and create stronger social bridges. When he first arrived, he said that he sought out local organizations, charities, and meeting places and introduce himself to people. He would tell them that he just

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arrived as a refugee and doesn’t know anything about life here. He followed up with what he did to make himself feel at home, which was by starting with himself.

“You have to know what you want. I know it takes time, I know it’s hard, I really struggled and I worked hard in order to reach my goal here. I fortunately managed within two months to meet a

woman who works at a community center that’s close to my place. She’s a psychotherapist, she told me ‘I really want to help you. Tell me what you want, what you need here.’ The neighbors are also here to meet you and say hello. I really felt home here. It was the first step for me. That

woman really helped me feel home here. She was nice and kind, and also humanitarian. With Dutch people, if you want to make contact with them, just like give them a bit of a smile. Sometimes it doesn’t work, like in big cities here, such as Amsterdam and Rotterdam, people are

very busy with work and study. They love to be on their own, they don’t want to talk to anyone else. The most important thing in my country, the first initiative is taken by the host; not by the

guest. But here, you have to take the first initiative. It’s totally different.”

While Tony’s conception of home is relational to local people and acceptance, it is also an internal struggle. Pertaining to the Emotional theme of making home, he must first focus on his personal motivation and his mental well-being in order to make home in the Netherlands. I ended the interview by asking him what his idea of home was before the war in Syria. He reminisced about how cozy and warm it felt with people there. They were more sociable, open-minded, and open-hearted. He had friends who were from Canada and the United States who visited him. He said that even they felt home Syria and very welcome. People smiled at them and were

respectful. “No discrimination, it’s full of warm and cozy friends.” The role-reversal of having western visitors in Syria reinforced his idea of a friendly and welcoming local population defining home.

One of my interviewees was an English student of mine, whose name will be Matthew. He is from Aleppo, Syria and fled to the Netherlands about a year and a half before this

interview. He was studying in Aleppo, but had to stop. If he wasn’t studying, he would need to join the army. If he joined the army, his mother and father feared for his life. This led him to the Netherlands. He speaks Dutch very well, at about a B2 fluency level and his English is likewise fluent. He wishes to study in the Netherlands, and therefore must pass the IELTS exam. While he

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is learning English, he learned Dutch within the first eight months of living in the country. He stays busy by working in a restaurant, giving gymnastics lessons twice a week to children, and a once-per-week obligation as a translator for Arabic to Dutch or English in his apartment’s office building. Matthew finds it difficult to feel at home in the Netherlands, however he is able to find Syrian food in Amsterdam that reminds him of home. He also has many Syrian friends who, as he puts it, is the only thing that makes him feel at home. In Syria, however, home was

inseparably tied with his family and the city of Aleppo itself.

“It’s an ancient city; one of the oldest in the world. It was so beautiful; the streets and the noise. Even if it was dirty, there was a smell to it that I love and miss.”

Interview with Matthew at his home in Amsterdam Nieuw-West, March 2018

One of the few interviews I had with Eritreans was conducted through a translator. The translator already works with Zorg Café to translate Tigrinya, and was more than happy to find a couple of newcomers whom I could interview. Because the newcomers spoke neither Dutch nor English, I was unable to communicate with them directly. Therefore, this example will not include their backstories preceding the interview. After a long day of Dutch classes and Taal Café, I waited for the translator to finish his duties at Zorg Café. He told me that he asked two Eritreans to wait for him and have an interview with me. I was quite excited at this opportunity, as I had not yet had a lot of success with interviewing Eritrean newcomers. The interview itself was recorded, however as a measure to further protect the interviewees’ identities, the recording device used was paused anytime they were talking. The recording only proceeded when either myself or the translator were talking. Lastly, one of the newcomers had to leave the interview early due to other obligations. The answers provided by both newcomers will be coded as Participant A and Participant B accordingly. I asked the newcomers about what their idea of home is.

To Participant A, home is “a place where I have total freedom. It’s where you have tranquility and acceptance. Where I have my full freedom.” For Participant B, “Home is to live peacefully

with family around you.”

Interview with Eritrean newcomers at BOOST, March 2018

At this point of the interview Participant B left. The next response is from Participant A after I asked about what he can do to feel more at home here. In order to feel at home in the

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Mallett (2004) in her discussion of Home as haven, she discusses the dichotomy of home being defined as opposing forces of public and private domains. “According to this dichotomy the inside or enclosed domain of the home represents a comfortable, secure and safe space” (Mallet 2004: 71, emphasis added). I conclude that both Participant A and B’s conceptualizations of home include notions of peace, tranquility, and freedom.

I will now introduce a transgender woman, whose pseudonym will be Clara. She is from Jordan, but was born in Syria. She knew English prior to her arrival to Amsterdam in December, 2015, which was greatly beneficial in her adjustment to life in the Netherlands. Her description of home is that “It’s warm, it comes from people. Your family, your loved ones, your friends.”

Interview with Clara at BOOST, February 2018

She added that making home in a new place is not a problem at all, rather it is something to add to your life. She had been living away from her family for three years, but it has been a freeing experience for her. At one point in her life, she moved to Kurdish Iraq for work and embraced her anonymity there. Because people did not know her, it gave her the freedom that she wanted. She admits that she does miss her family, but will persist nevertheless. This point is driven home in Mallett’s (2004: 77-78) summary of home and journeying. Quoting related literature, she states “The pathway taken out of home, whether chosen or imposed, is often crucial in how these young people and/or their [past, present and future] homes are identified and defined” (Mallet, 2004: 78). When the interview was concluded, she confessed to me that when she was a teenager, she despised her community and wanted to leave.

“But now that I left my community, I feel like I miss it. It’s emotional, because you think you can get rid of your past and your people; but you can’t. But if you’re forced, you have to. Like in my

case, I have to leave everything behind me.”

Interview with Clara at BOOST, February 2018

This last quote gives strength to Mallet’s (2004: 78) point that “According to this construction, home is thought of as a nurturing environment underpinned by stable relationships that facilitate a capacity for independence”. Her notion of feeling freed by her anonymity in another country was not without her acknowledgment that her family and home in Jordan will be with her always.

There was a Syrian woman with whom I was enrolled in Dutch lessons whose name will be Sofia. She fled to Dubai during the war with her husband and child. This interview was

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emotionally taxing for her when I prompted her to describe home in Syria. When I asked, she became somber. Holding back tears, she quietly said that she cannot talk about what home was. “If I talk about home in Syria, that means I have to talk about my son.” It was then that I learned that her son was killed during the war. However, feeling at home became much easier in the Netherlands because she had her freedom and was able to connect with fellow Syrian

newcomers. It became clear that her conception of home was centered on her family and fellow countrymen.

The next newcomer will be a Syrian named Keith who I met during Taal Café. He and I became personally acquainted outside of BOOST because of his interest in improving his English and Dutch skills. One evening after English lessons, I invited him to a local pool hall to spend some time together. We talked about our lives in our respective home countries and eventually I asked him if he’d be willing to answer some interview questions. He delightfully agreed and was happy to help, having seen me talk to other newcomers about their experiences. Before coming to Amsterdam, he lived in Turkey and disliked it greatly because Syrians did not have many rights and he felt they were exploited. His idea of home is primarily Syria, however firmly believes that home is not connected with a place; but rather with feelings and ideas. “Home is where you don’t have to escape”. He tells me that in order to make home, you must start with yourself and your thoughts. To achieve this, he must be motivated and determined to learn.

As a conclusion to this section, Shelley Mallett asked “Is home places, spaces, feelings,

practices, and/or an active state of being in the world?” (2004: 65). There is no simple answer to this question, however as demonstrated by the stories above the various conceptualizations of home are complex and dynamic. This section outlined what these newcomers conceive home as, and chapter 2 will delve deeper into what barriers and opportunities they experienced during their processes of making home.

1.5: Methodology and Reflexivity

I set out into the field with a plan to employ three primary research methods: Semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and focus groups. I anticipated the interview method to be my primary mode of data collection, however quickly realized that such a reliance would not be plausible. On many occasions, I petitioned a newcomer to have an interview with

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me. I count myself very lucky that everyone I asked agreed to schedule an interview; or at least did not say no directly. Much to my frustration, very few interviews actually transpired on the agreed upon date and time. There were even instances where, for example, a newcomer agreed to have an interview after lunch. When that time came, however, they sat down at a table to

participate in Taal Café instead. To relieve some of the blame, Taal Café happens directly after lunch, so the transition from lunch to Taal Café is quick and often seamless. According to Oskar, Arabic culture does not possess a propensity towards scheduled meetings. While I do not agree with the generalization of any population by principle, nor do I prescribe to the notion of cultural essentialism, I must admit that my experience trying to set up interviews were consistent with Oskar’s observation. Instead of focusing primarily on interviews, I spent the largest proportion of my fieldwork participating in BOOST’s Dutch language classes, lunches, and Taal Café; leaving little room each day to schedule interviews. What occurred instead was an unanticipated amount of information I gathered from day-to-day conversations; interactions that I initially would not have characterized as formal research. After a slow start to my fieldwork, I changed tactics and began to use the existing system at BOOST to my advantage. I would most often ask newcomers if they would be willing to help me with my research by talking about their life in the

Netherlands, which was mostly met with a warm, accommodating willingness. If I was doing this during Taal Café, I would first request each participant’s permission to record their

responses, and then proceed to suggest talking about topics related to my research interests. As a reminder, these interactions would pose a question, the more-proficient-than-I local would better translate my question, and continue to perpetuate the topic and help glean more detailed

responses from newcomers. Some Taal Coaches went a step further and translated the newcomers’ responses to English for my convenience. Other opportunities of data collection were likewise seamless. Another strategy I used was to engage in small talk by asking their name, where they’re from, and how long they have lived in the Netherlands. Because such questions and introductions are so frequently exchanged between people at BOOST, it felt completely natural. Even better, it segued smoothly into my research questions. This method coupled with participant observation, that was dominantly used as a means to reinforce verbal responses given my newcomers, and secondarily enabled me to contextualize my data. For example, I would note with whom people sat during lunches and Taal Café.

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Conducting semi-structured interviews was the second-most employed method of data collection. I learned quickly that setting up appointments was not an effective mode of doing interviews, because according to Oskar, Arabic culture doesn’t work with appointments. Instead, I did most interviews with varying degrees of spontaneity that was met with greater success. In total, there were 34 interactions that ended up being usable data. Of those, there were 15 semi-structured interviews. To break these down further, 7 were recorded interviews and the

remaining 8 were interviews whose context was not conducive to using my tape recorder. These were therefore recorded using written notes. The remaining 19 interactions were characterized as informal conversations, whose topics were relevant and applicable to my research. It is worth noting that these numbers reflect the number of individuals with whom I spoke, and does not include the number of repeated interactions with some of the same informants.

The last method used was organizing two separate focus groups. While I intended to hold more, it was implausible to organize a group of newcomers more frequently. This is because of a few factors. Chief among these is the language barrier. Owing to the diversity of newcomers at BOOST, systematic sampling would have resulted in a multilingual group of informants whose fluencies in Dutch or English would be equally variable. The first focus group was held among two Eritrean newcomers and a translator. To communicate, I would pose my questions to the translator in English, and he would translate the questions to Tigrinya for my respondents, who would in turn mirror this process to provide answers. The second focus group included eight newcomers, whose common language was Arabic. This focus group was easier and did not require a translator. It was mostly conducted in Dutch, however intermittently changed to English depending on who was speaking and mostly did not require a translator.

Due to the informal setting and often fleeting sociality at my field site, my sampling method was unsystematic. This was primarily due to ease of access to informants. Put simply, if a newcomer was not able to communicate clearly in either English or Dutch, it was not feasible to invite them for an interview. Because of this bias, my sampling pool lacked appropriate representation of Eritrean newcomers and disproportionately features male informants over female informants. Therefore, I gathered informants whose English and/or Dutch were

conversational and who were socially active at BOOST. Being socially active is unofficially and loosely defined as regularly participating in Dutch language lessons, Taal Café, or attending daily lunches. It is also important to note that none of my data came from people who have never

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attended BOOST. However, there were a couple of instances of respondents who only attended BOOST once or twice. The most applicable sampling method I employed was the snowball method; which is where I gather informants based on the word-of-mouth from newcomers with whom I am already acquainted. The more immediate method of gathering informants was my reputation at BOOST. My position as the only American who attends BOOST (at the time of my field work) made me rather out of place. This made people curious and asked why an American student is in the Netherlands in the first place. In my introduction, I would talk about how I came from the United States, that I give English lessons, and that I’m a student at University of

Amsterdam. This typically led to their follow-up question of what it is that I’m studying. After responding that I’m studying cultural anthropology, I was able to talk about my research as the reason I am at BOOST and in the Netherlands. This was nearly always met with support and curiosity. I would then ask if they would like to help me with my research and talk about their experience in the Netherlands.

The majority of my data was gathered at BOOST, but was not completely limited to this location. There were several interviews that were conducted either in a café in Amsterdam or in their homes over dinner. I believe that both at BOOST and outside of BOOST are useful sites to discuss the conception of home and integration, but for different reasons. Because all of my data was self-reported from my respondents, newcomers may be willing to discuss some topics in a public setting, and prefer other information to be given in a more private setting. As an example, the experience was much richer to hear about a newcomer’s focus on family when describing home during a dinner with their wife and four children.

I found out about BOOST from an online article on the news site Al-Jazeera, whose news story featured HOOST; which was the name of the organization before it later became BOOST. I visited BOOST first in October, 2017. By complete coincidence, the site was about five minutes away cycling from my apartment in Amsterdam. My first visit to the site was comical, the first person I talked to was an Australian woman volunteering in the kitchen. I mentioned that I was there to talk to someone about getting involved with BOOST. Her next question was “Well, are you any good in the kitchen?” Just after, an older Dutch woman (who I later learned is a

prominent Taal Coach) applauded the Australian volunteer for “recruiting people off of the street to volunteer.” I met with a floor manager and discussed BOOST’s services, and where volunteers are needed. It was at this point that I began volunteering as an English teacher; well before my

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fieldwork began the following January. When my fieldwork finally began, I was wrestling with my position within BOOST. I was struggling with whether I would present myself as a

researcher or as the English teacher that everyone came to know in the months prior. It quickly became easier once I enrolled in Dutch lessons. At first, I had to explain my intentions to the teachers, who repeatedly suggested that I seek Dutch lessons elsewhere. The lessons commonly had us introducing ourselves, so it was glaringly obvious that I was an outsider when I said that I was from the United States. As time went on, however, everyone knew who I was. In some particularly comical situations, other students would introduce me to the teachers. The teacher would ask if people knew me, and everyone said yes, which made me feel rather welcome. At some point, I ceased being the outsider and became a sort of feature in the classes. I moved classes quickly, and people expressed their friendly disappointment whenever I “graduated” to the next level of Dutch courses. I made many close friendships with newcomers, and my

research started to feel more natural; like I’m among friends. This made for easier conversations that felt more like hanging out than interviews.

I couldn’t help but feel a small amount of guilt being at BOOST. Some people told me (however light-heartedly) that I didn’t need to learn Dutch because I’ll only be here for a year. My meteoric rise through the Dutch classes was also a point of guilt. When I tell people that I’ve only been here since August, 2017 they’re surprised that my Dutch is at such a high level. Some of the guild stemmed from my livelihood not being dependent on learning Dutch, but rather am in an affluent position as an American student to take these lessons for seemingly no reason. My gut response was to sheepishly thank them, and humbly attribute my success to my previous experience with learning German and studying Linguistics. I also explained to people that I learned Dutch so I could speak with more people at BOOST; which was central to my purpose in the Netherlands. When I first arrived, I could only speak English and could barely make a

sentence in Dutch. I now reminisced about how many conversations and friendships were made possible by me and other newcomers both having learned Dutch.

My English lessons hastily became a more insignificant part of my place at BOOST. I introduced myself as William from the United States, a student at BOOST, and I’m doing my research here. Although, I did volunteer my time to give one-on-one English lessons for those who were not available on Tuesday evenings. Because I was consistently at BOOST, I was the first one people spoke to about enrolling for English lessons. I made a conscious effort to be

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aware of the boundaries of both my English teaching and my research. I was wary to involve my students in my data collection because these students were in my class to learn English; not be study participants. As my reasoning went, it would be ethically unsound to foster power-laden relationship that could result in students feeling an obligation to participate in my research. At the very least, I would not subject English students to my research inquiries during classroom hours. Ethically speaking, this reconciled my requesting of their participation in my research in their free time. With language being such a prominent factor in integration and making home, it was difficult to ignore the importance of why these students were exerting such effort to learn English. To be later discussed in chapter 2, learning English was a powerful tool to overcome barriers to integration. Further, knowing English was an inseparable factor in many newcomers’ opportunities that helped them make home in the Netherlands.

I will offer now offer some direction for future research based on topics and demographics that my research did not properly address. As a demographic, males were

disproportionately represented in my research. As such, there were too few female participants to adequately produce a gender-sensitive perspective of the conceptions of home and integration. Beyond this thesis, more attention toward women as a demographic of vulnerable migrants is needed. Secondly, specific attention is needed toward the Eritrean population in the Netherlands. Drawing from observations and conversations with different parties, this group is perceivably undergoing struggles in respect to integration. Elaborating on this point, my research

indiscriminately organized participants into a socially-constructed group deemed ‘newcomers’ that is markedly unconcerned with legal status. Research into making home and integration that is more sensitive to individual’s legal status would be fruitful. As this thesis stands, there is little engagement with evaluating processes of integration, barriers and opportunities to integration, and experiences of making home that distinguish legal status. Specific to research topics in Amsterdam, many of my informants reside, or have lived, in an AZC

(Asielzoekerscentrum/Asylum Seekers Center) somewhere in the Netherlands. I lamentably neglected to visit such centers for fear of backlash stemming from invading the personal spaces of newcomers without explicit consent. This resulted in a less-complete picture of making home in Amsterdam, and future researchers who endeavor to build upon this topic would do well to gain access to an AZC and its inhabitants to gain perspective from its residents. While language barriers were not fatal to my research, such barriers inevitably excluded some

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valuable interlocutors from my data. While I made light use of translators, I recommend a greater use of translators when learning from newcomers. Doing so will put the researcher in a better position to gather data objectively; without regard to how well would-be informants speak Dutch or English. Lastly, I wish to press the value of working closely with a non-governmental

organization like BOOST. I firmly believe that future research into experiences of making home would greatly benefit from working with an organization(s) whose aims are to improve

conditions (manifesting in various forms) for a target population. I therefore recommend considering the impact of community organizations on populations of interest.

1.5.1: Participatory Action Research

As an anthropologist, I owe my loyalty foremost to my informants. I stand strongly that the data and knowledge I obtained to make this thesis possible belong equally to the newcomers who shared their stories with me, the volunteers who imparted their experiences, and the

organization as a whole who housed my work. I therefore considered it appropriate to align my research with the aims of Participatory Action Research (PAR). John Van Willigen defines PAR as “Methods of research and social action that occurs when individuals of a community join together with a professional researcher to study and transform their community in ways that they mutually value” (Van Willigen, 2002: 77). A key function of PAR is the attention to local

knowledge, presenting an alternative to the ethnographer acting as the sole authority on a project. This practice provided a boon to my field work, as the newcomers are the individuals “living” the lives that I have so far intellectualized. Van Willigen (2002: 80) refers to Greenwood and Levin for their coining of the term “cogenerative learning”, which is used to describe this exchange of information between local informants and the researcher. I have also drawn inspiration from Julie Hemment’s (2007) essay that outlines the use of PAR as a social change methodology in her research in post-Soviet Russia. Her goal was to bring PAR together with her ethnographic fieldwork, to bring the people of Zhenskii Svet into the decision-making processes for their own organizational development. The author compares the goals of PAR to those of critical anthropology, which “…includes a reflexive imperative – requiring that the analyst undertake a ‘double move’, revealing the self in the process of studying the other” (Hemment, 2007: 303).

Beyond the field, I made a point to have meetings with my academic supervisor and other professors in my department at University of Amsterdam. As a result of these meetings, I revised

Finding home in the other : newcomers' experiences of making home and integration in Amsterdam East