Doctoral Dissertation Research: Maintaining Social Relationships through Periods of Protracted Insecurity in Refugee Communities

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Global displacement due to forced migration is currently at historically high levels. Many of those refugees have experienced decades of violence and insecurity, making it difficult to maintain relationships. Researchers have established that strong community, kin, and network relations are essential to social and political stability. This project, which trains a graduate student in methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, explores how these relationships are maintained during extended periods of precarity. Findings will be disseminated to organizations that manage and develop policy related to refugee resettlement. The research also fosters international scientific cooperation, and broadens the participation of an underrepresented group in the sciences.Mariam Banahi, under the supervision of Dr. Veena Das of The Johns Hopkins University, will explore how kinship is conceived and affective relationships are maintained in the face of both protracted insecurity and periods of crisis. The research will be conducted in Hamburg, Germany, home to the largest Afghan community in Europe, and will employ anthropological tools of data collection, such as participant-observation, structured and semi-structured interviews, informal, open-ended conversations, budget surveys, genealogical charts, and household budgets. Though comprising one of the largest refugee groups worldwide, migration and refugee studies have largely ignored Afghans and Afghanistan. Also, Afghan conceptions of kin networks conceive of relatedness as both inclusive and beyond immediate blood relationships to larger ethno-linguistic, tribal, religious, and national communities. By investigating the practices and labors through which Afghans forge relations in spite of conflict, loss, and death, this research will contribute to theories on violence and chronic insecurity as they affect the families. Moreover, by attending to the Afghan family, this research will explore the often elided consequences of conflict to investigate refugee kinship and Muslim communities in Germany. Lastly, this research will foster greater interest in the academic study of Afghanistan through teaching and publications, as well as encourage collaborative partnerships between diverse actors engaged with emigrant communities.