Crafting Selves in Multiple Worlds (e-book) (used book) | bookbook.eu

Description

The in-migration of refugees and immigrants, both legal and illegal, has reemerged as a potent socio-political issue in the United States. This has created a moral panic about "foreigners" who are said, in an old but still effective rhetoric, to be feeding rising crime rates, filling the public schools with non-English speakers, going on "welfare," and in other ways staining and darkening everyday life in small towns and cities. This is a longtime concern discussed in a substantial social science literature on refugees and immigrants. This literature was reviewed and used to frame an interpretive study to learn what it is like to be a foreign young woman in a Midwestern metropolitan area. A hermeneutic phenomeno-logical study was done on the everyday lived-experiences of four foreign-born young women to describe and understand their experiences of being "foreign(ers)" and their meanings. Being "foreign" as lived and told by each woman is shown in their lives - in their bodies; in how they live and experience time, space, and relationships; in how they are in their human fullness. "Foreignness" is shown to be spatial - socially, culturally, economically, politically, and personally.