TY - JOUR
T1 - For Refugees, the Road to Employment in the United States Is Paved With Workable Uncertainties and Controversies
AU - Koyama, Jill
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Eastern Sociological Society
PY - 2017/9
Y1 - 2017/9
N2 - Drawing on data—including survey responses, interviews, documents, and participant observation—collected during a 26-month ethnography of refugees in a northeastern U.S. city, I examine how recently arrived refugees create and access new employment opportunities. I utilize actor-network theory (ANT) to examine refugees' linkages as emerging, temporal, and fluid. I empirically trace the drawing together of, and interaction among, individual refugees, formal organizations, new cultural ideas, and a myriad of material objects. I examine the connections between the uncertainties about actors, action, and agency that point to the need to understand society as sociomaterial networks. I analyze the controversies that are deployed in an emerging assemblage as the refugees entered the paid workforce in the United States. I am guided by a broad question: How are meaning, knowledge, and facts that come to make up a network actually made, maintained, remade, and, sometimes, undone? I demonstrate that putting assemblage to work offers insights into the ways in which heterogeneous elements come together in often unanticipated ways to create stable, even if temporary, employment networks for refugees in the United States.
AB - Drawing on data—including survey responses, interviews, documents, and participant observation—collected during a 26-month ethnography of refugees in a northeastern U.S. city, I examine how recently arrived refugees create and access new employment opportunities. I utilize actor-network theory (ANT) to examine refugees' linkages as emerging, temporal, and fluid. I empirically trace the drawing together of, and interaction among, individual refugees, formal organizations, new cultural ideas, and a myriad of material objects. I examine the connections between the uncertainties about actors, action, and agency that point to the need to understand society as sociomaterial networks. I analyze the controversies that are deployed in an emerging assemblage as the refugees entered the paid workforce in the United States. I am guided by a broad question: How are meaning, knowledge, and facts that come to make up a network actually made, maintained, remade, and, sometimes, undone? I demonstrate that putting assemblage to work offers insights into the ways in which heterogeneous elements come together in often unanticipated ways to create stable, even if temporary, employment networks for refugees in the United States.
KW - actor-network theory
KW - employment
KW - ethnography
KW - material objects
KW - meaning
KW - refugees
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U2 - 10.1111/socf.12346
DO - 10.1111/socf.12346
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85018876379
VL - 32
SP - 501
EP - 521
JO - Sociological Forum
JF - Sociological Forum
SN - 0884-8971
IS - 3
ER -