Academic literature on the topic 'Mangere refugee reception centre'

Summary Due to its long border of the European Union Schengen Area, Hungary has long been affected by the rapidly growing inward migration towards the EU, which has become more acute in recent years. Inadequate access to healthcare among migrants has been widely reported and this may be due to a vast array of factors and may result in poorer health outcomes. Between August 2014 and April 2015 a questionnaire survey was conducted among migrants from a range of countries residing in the largest Hungarian refugee reception centre to establish participants’ health knowledge and access to healthcare in Hungary (medical assessment, vaccination, etc.). The survey was complemented with an educational program which aimed to increase participants’ awareness of healthcare provision and to promote the prevention of the infectious diseases that are common in Europe. The results showed that half the participants (52%) had no information of healthcare provision and the majority (61%) did not participate in any medical assessment since arriving in the reception centre. Since under-immunization may be a potential risk for the re-emergence of vaccine-preventable diseases for recipient countries, it was alarming that a significant proportion of African participants (21%) reported not having received any childhood vaccinations. Data demonstrated deficiencies in participants’ health knowledge and also an urgent need to address mental health problems of arriving migrants. This article offers a valuable insight into the role of health educational interventions conducted for asylum seekers in refugee reception centres and discusses a number of practical application aspects for future educational programs.

We describe an outbreak of meningitis at a Sudanese refugee camp in Northern Uganda that lasted over a year from February 1994. Some 291 cases occurred in a refugee population of 96860 (averaged over the year), an attack rate of 0·30%. The case fatality rate was 13·3%. From a small number of samples taken for culture N. meningitidis serogroup A, serotype 21[ratio ]P1·9, clone III-1 was identified as the causative organism. The outbreak started in the camp's reception centre which had the highest attack rate. Spread from the reception centre was rapid and the epidemic reached its peak within 3 weeks. All of the cases amongst residents of the reception centre reported having had meningococcal vaccine before arriving at the camp and so were not immunized on arrival as would normally have been the case. Some 37547 doses of meningococcal vaccine were used in a mass immunization campaign in February and March 1994. Following this the outbreak was declared over in August 1994 when no cases were registered for 2 consecutive weeks. However, following a massive and sudden influx of refugees a new epidemic peak occurred during February 1995. Many of these new refugees were also not immunized on arrival due to pressures of numbers. A follow-up immunization campaign then brought an end to the outbreak. Our experience confirms the effectiveness of timely and high-coverage immunization campaigns in controlling group A meningitis outbreaks amongst refugees in Africa.

Background: The links between migration and health are well documented. Being a refugee exacerbates migrants’ vulnerability through trauma and loss. The aim of this study is to identify sources of resilience, coping and posttraumatic growth in female Eritrean refugees living in Norwegian asylum reception centres. Method: The study had a qualitative, descriptive and explorative design with two focus group interviews and 10 individual in-depth interviews. Participants included 18 female Eritrean refugees aged 18–60, who had obtained refugee status and were still living in an asylum reception centre. A content-focused hermeneutic analytic approach was used. Results: Interviewees described the challenges of pre-flight and flight trauma, conditions at the refugee centre, communication difficulties and the ‘endless’ waiting for transfer to a municipality. To cope, they found it helpful to focus on the future and to think positively. Fellowship with and support from fellow Eritrean refugees were essential as they became a proxy family and provided a strong ethnic identity. Their religious belief also helped them cope and gave them hope for the future. Discussion: The interviewees in this study perceived their psychological problems as a normal reaction to what they had been through. Religious belief was an important resilience factor, as was social support, especially from peers. Conclusion: The interviewees’ coping was based on the realization of their psychological reactions being normal while doing their utmost to focus on their aims and hopes for the future.

Abstract This ethnographic study contributes to the scholarly call to increase studies on refugee journeys. It explores Tibetan journeys via Nepal to India and provides a novel case study about the Tibetan refugees who commonly cross the Himalayas at least partly on foot without passports and head to the Tibetan Reception Centre in Kathmandu, Nepal, from where they are assisted to India. Conceptually, the study argues that combining the studies of refugee journeys and transit migration increases understanding of the (Tibetan) refugee journeys. The findings reveal that the risky journey has a remarkable meaning both for those Tibetans who have done the journey and collectively for the diaspora Tibetans in India. As Tibetans, like refugees in general are still often victimised and their subjectivities overlooked, the study also contributes to a fuller understanding of the Tibetan refugee agency through the journey narratives of the interviewees of this study.

Vulnerability to crisis in newly arrived refugee youth is common as they try to come to terms with past traumatic experiences and acculturate to the new country in which they have settled. This study examined the effects of a short-term music therapy program on the changes to the Behaviour Symptom Index (BSI, Reynolds and Kamphus, 1998) of 31 new refugee youths attending an English language reception centre in Brisbane. A cross-over design with two five-week intervention periods was employed with group music therapy sessions conducted one-two times per week. Results indicate that changes to BSI scores approached significance indicating trends that music therapy affected a positive change on generalised behaviour. Findings are discussed with reference to stabilizing and preventing crises with this population.

Following the tragic events of the Christchurch shooting on 15th March 2019, New Zealanders projected a national image of hospitality towards Muslim New Zealanders, involving an Islamic call to prayer in Parliament, and women wearing hijab in solidarity – unique public demonstrations of compassion and inclusion. In 2020, the New Zealand government will raise its refugee quota to 1,500 refugees per year as part of its United Nations obligations and remove its race-based aspects [1]. Globally, there are vast displacements of people fleeing persecution and economic oppression [2]. Arguably, despite its small refugee resettlement quota, New Zealand appears hospitable. Yet our study reveals a context within which negative economic, social and political factors dominate policy and practices. It similarly highlights ways in which New Zealand’s hospitality towards refugees is paternalistic and interventionist, even if not deliberately [3]. ‘Being hospitable’ is typically defined as a social relation that accompanies the ideologies and unconditional practices of ‘welcome’ [4]. As an act of welcome, hospitality gives ethical recognition to the stranger. This practice of hospitality enables and resonates a feeling of belonging and inclusion. However, the intrinsic nature of hospitality may foster exclusion as well as inclusion. The Christchurch incident arose from an act of unwelcome and a false sense of security from authorities as previous discrimination reported by the local refugee Muslim community was ignored. As such, key questions remain about how hospitable New Zealand is to refugees. When refugees are resettled into a destination, refugee-focused service providers (including not-for-profits, community groups and NGOs) offer frontline services to ease refugees’ experiences of trauma and marginalisation. They provide advocacy and welcome through reception processes, translation services and multicultural centres. We facilitated a national think tank attended by 34 refugee-focused service providers to examine how they practice a hospitable welcome through their advocacy and frontline services and how the welcome could be improved. Participants identified the need for greater collaboration and communication between refugee-focused service providers to enhance trust, relationships, to enable former refugees to feel safe in voicing their concerns and access services, and to reduce the competition and duplication of service provision in the face of scarce funding. They also recognised the need to increase attention to the notion of welcome and advocacy by adopting practices from non-interventionist actions that draw on the notion of welcome as empathetic, warm and connecting, with minimum rules, and to centre refugee voices with their active participation in policy development, service delivery and social inclusion activities. Participants also advocated continued efforts by the media and wider community to reduce discrimination and negative social dialogue around refugees and to encourage their social inclusion. To achieve these outcomes, participants raised the need to address the important issues of underfunding and strategy underpinning the delivery of refugee-focused service provision. Overall, our findings suggest that beneath the initial welcoming surface, an alternative perspective may be concealed that restricts us from providing a broader inclusive hospitality and welcome into Aotearoa New Zealand. To bridge this potential impasse, a more humanistic approach is potentially required, where refugees actively co-create the critical framing of hospitality [5, 6] to better support their resettlement. The original research on which this article is based is available here https://doi.org/10.1080/02642069.2018.1472243 Corresponding author Alison McIntosh can be contacted at: alison.mcintosh@aut.ac.nz References (1) Graham-McLay, C. Under Pressure, New Zealand Ends Policy Branded Racist. The New York Times, Oct 4, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/world/asia/jacinda-ardern-refugees-new-zealand.html?fbclid=IwAR0JYwr7Fl31gtQ9qXS0XTTLXyNkTXSC9DBWot0Mf0UtQLp9EXTBKTmqcBk (accessed Oct 20, 2019). (2) Goldin, I.; Cameron, G.; Balarajan, M. Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped our World and will Define our Future; Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, 2012. (3) McIntosh, A.; Cockburn-Wootten, C. Refugee-Focused Service Providers: Improving the Welcome in New Zealand. The Service Industries Journal 2018. https://doi.org/10.1080/02642069.2018.1472243. (4). Lynch, P.; Germann Molz, J.; McIntosh, A.; Lugosi, P.; Lashley, C. Theorizing Hospitality. Hospitality & Society 2011, 1 (1), 3–24. https://doi.org/10.1386/hosp.1.1.3_2 (5) Still, J. Derrida and Hospitality: Theory and Practice; Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 2010. (6) Brebner, L.; McIntosh, A.; Ewazi, S.; van Veen, M. Eds. Tastes of Home; Auckland University of Technology: Auckland, 2018.

The 46th NERA Congress was held on March 8th to 10th 2018 at the University of Oslo. NERA is the Nordic Educational Research Association that brings together researchers in the field of educational sciences in the Nordic countries. An essential part of the association and of the congress are NERA’s 24 networks that are organised around different subject areas in educational sciences like early childhood research, youth research etc.. There is a network also for social pedagogy. Its aim is to develop and strengthen the cooperation between researchers and professional groups, engaged or interested in the field of social pedagogy, in the Nordic countries and even wider in Northern Europe like in Poland and Germany. It is currently coordinated by six researchers from five different countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Poland and Sweden. The theme for NERA2018 congress was Educational Research: Boundaries, Breaches and Bridges. The Social pedagogy network had organized altogether four sessions during the congress dealing with topical issues in the field of social pedagogical research. These sessions included two roundtable discussions, the first one dealing with sensitive research and the second one on social pedagogy at schools. In addition to the roundtables there was one symposium considering research in the area of asylum seekers and refugees, and one session was for traditional paper presentations. The countries that were represented in network sessions were Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Finland, and Poland. The sessions awakened animated conversations between participants. One common topic of the discussed issues related to the role and transformation of social pedagogy in changing societies. The sessions of the social pedagogy network were opened up by the roundtable discussion on sensitive research. The leading question for the short presentations of the roundtable participants was: how to research in cooperation with extremely vulnerable people. We heard two interesting presentations by Irena Dychawy Rosner from Malmö University and by Aneta Ostaszewska from the University of Warsaw that giuded us to a discussion about how to support the participation in social pedagogical research of e.g. women working in prostitution so that not just their anonymity and well-being during the research process are secured but also their autonomy and agency could be supported. The research examples shown in the presentations were so fascinating that the discussion around them filled up all the time of the roundtable although we had planned to have four presentations instead of two but there had been two cancellations. The second session following the roundtable was a traditional paper presentation session. Even this session had one last minute cancellation – we assumed it was because of the flue season – so we had two presentations by Jan Arvid Haugan from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and Vilborg Jóhannsdóttir from the University of Iceland. Jan Arvid’s presentation was on ’Coping strategies and resilience in upper secondary school’. He shared with us some social pedagogically interesting findings about the background factors behind school drop-out. He himself told us that he was not familiar with the social pedagogical discussion but he had thought that his research findings could be of use in our field when we are trying to find out ways how to support the integration of young people. And he certainly had right. Vilborg’s presentation on the other hand was very interesting for another reason: it was about Icelandic social pedagogy, which differs quite a lot from the understandings of social pedagogy in other Nordic countries. In Iceland, the social pedagogical practice concerns almost only work with people with disabilities. The professional education, role and perspectives of social pedagogy have developed in line with the paradigm change rooted in the CRPD (Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities), which has replaced the medical understanding of disability by the social relational understanding of disability. For example in Finland, the social pedagogical discussion and practice have focused very little on people with disabilities. The second roundtable was on social pedagogy at schools. There were four short presentations leading to a common discussion about the role that social pedagogy and social pedagogues have and could have at schools in different Nordic countries. Vilborg Jóhannsdóttir shared us more thoughts on social pedagogy in Iceland concentrating now on the work that the social pedagogues are doing in inclusive schools. Their role seems to be very essential in supporting the education of disabled children and young people in ’normal’ schools but it is at the same time quite controversal. Amela Pacuka from the Oslo Metropolitan University asked us in her presentation: What social pedagogy is for? She had a very critical perspective towards social pedagogy as it is practiced in Norway at schools: trying to find a balance between measurement, quality assurance, testing and relations work. Margareta Fehland and Mikael Boregren from Malmö University presented a project that they have been working on developing a new way of listening to kids in school. Their presentation roused a lively discussion about empathy and about the possiblity to teach empathy in social pedagogical studies. Interestingy, discussion about empathy and about teaching empathy has just recently awaken in the Finnish social pedagogical discussion. Eija Raatikainen, Leigh Anne Rauhala and Seija Mäenpää from Metropolia University of Applied Sciences have published an article about professional empathy called ’Qualified Empathy: A key element for an empowerment professional’ in the Finnish journal of social pedagogy. It is available online in English (Raatikainen, Rauhala, Mäenpää 2017). The last peresentation in the roundtable was about social pedagogical thinking at schools in Finland, presented by Elina Nivala from the University of Eastern Finland. It described social pedagogy as an approach rather than a profession meaning that different professionals at school can have a social pedagogical orientation in their work: A teacher, a special education teacher, a school social worker and even a school nurse can have a social pedagogical mindset in their work e.g. when building pedagogical relations and working holistically with the pupils, supporting their participation and finding ways to strengthen the school community and well-being of everybody at schools. All of them can be considered social pedagogues at schools if they want to develop their work based on social pedagogical thinking. The last session organised by the Social pedagogy network was the symposium called ’How to research in the area of asylum seekers and refugees’. It included originally six presentations: two from Finland and four from Denmark but two of those from Denmark were cancelled. The two presentations from Finland were ’Acts of citizenship in reception centre’ by Päivikki Rapo, and ’Life on hold? – A research project on agency and belonging of asylum seekers’ by Elina Nivala, both of them from the University of Eastern Finland. The Danish presentations were ’How do asylum-seekers experience a sense of meaningfulness in their everyday life in asylum-centres’ Anna Ørnemose, Lene Løkkegård and Lis Leleur, and ’Creating a sense of meaning in connection to school attendance of unaccompanied asylum seeking children’ by Nadia Klarsgaard & Kasper Drevsholt, all of them from the University College of Northern Denmark (UCN). The symposium had a wonderful opportunity to provide an arena for comparative discussion about social pedagogigal asylum research, which is a relatively new field in both countries. Discussions were animated but there could have been more time for comparative perspectives. This shows the need for more research and discussions on this field between different countries. One of the discussed topics concerned asylum seeker women and their possibilities to participation. According to observations of Danish researchers in an asylum center in Denmark, asylum seeker women were denied to get their own spaces. This was argumented with ideas of gender equality in Danish society. In Finland, the challenges on physical spaces of reception centres have also been discussed. Rapo (2018) made an ethnographic research in a Finnish reception centre for her master's thesis. In the observed reception centre, women's fragile position was understood and it was taken into account but even then some restrictions of spaces were noticed only later. It will be interesting to follow how practicies related to gender will transform in reception centres, as questions concerning gender, religion, culture and participation in Western societies are challenging. It is obvious that knowledge on participation and agency of asylum seeker and refugee women is much needed, and social pedagogical research could provide valuable perspectives and tools to produce it. All in all, the presentations and discussions during the sessions showed us very clearly that there is a lot of interesting research and work done in the field of social pedagogy in the Nordic countries. They also illustrated explicitly that the traditions in social pedagogical discussion and practice do differ quite a lot between different Nordic countries. Due to this, there should be more discussion about how social pedagogical practicies have developed historically in different societies and how they are defined theoretically. It is important to discuss critically how social pedagogical work is in practice but it would be of utmost importance to discuss as well how the practices are understood and represented in theory: what is it that makes something social pedagogical, how can it be conceptualised and what makes it different from other fields of practice. And the same goes to research: are there some elements that make research social pedagogical. We hope that the next NERA congress in Uppsala, Sweden on March 6th to 8th will provide an as lively arena for discussions than the previous one did and even more opportunities for critical reflection and shared moments of new understanding. We welcome all new researchers interested in social pedagogy to join us there.

A primary task for refugee families and children who are resettling in a new country is to develop a sense of belonging in that place, time and context. This article theorises the pōwhiri, the traditional Māori ceremony of welcome or ritual of encounter, as a metaphor for refugee families and children coming to belong in Aotearoa New Zealand. The theory-building is derived from observation of pōwhiri at the Mangere Refugee Resettlement Centre, where refugees live on their first arrival in Aotearoa New Zealand; pedagogical documentation from the Early Childhood Centre at the Auckland University of Technology Centre for Refugee Education; collaborative discussions with the co-researcher, Ruth Ham, who is the kaiako (‘head teacher’) at the Early Childhood Centre; and recordings of discussions with interpreters. The next phase in this research will be to trial and evaluate this theory and strategies of belonging in three different early childhood centres, two of which include refugee families, and the third, immigrant families.

Refugee camps are an example of ‘post crisis’ rehabilitative systems, which vainly attempt to restore stability in a state of disaster (Azmara, 2012). Uprooted from their homes and thrust into volatile and unfamiliar surroundings, civil conflict and natural disasters have left millions of refugees around the world destitute in their host countries, stripped of their identity and humanity and left with only the clothes on their backs. Unlike in rural settlements, the urban settlement patterns of refugees in Johannesburg have demonstrated a unique gravitational shift from reliance on local government assistance to a strong and long standing affiliation with various religious fraternities in the urban centres. This has then resulted in the inquisitorial search of how well have these urban churches served the needs of the urban displaced communities? By opening up their church buildings to refugees as a place sanctity and solace, how has this spiritual affiliation effected the reception, protection and rehabilitation of psychologically and physically traumatized refugees and asylum seekers? Subsequently has Johannesburg as a city, made provision for the sheltering and protecting of refugees, should there ever again be a crisis of violent xenophobic turmoil in the city’s townships? This thesis seeks to explore the underlying differences between designing a post crisis emergency shelter and specifically developing a transitory sanctuary tailored for urban refugees. By merging the dissimilar approaches assumed by secular refugee aiding organisations and the religious fraternities, the design starts to illustrate the symbolic connection between refuge and solace; spirituality and rehabilitation, as well as making note of the harmonies that exist within humanitarian architecture and sacred architecture. By understanding these fundamental parallels, a premise is formed for the development of a unique and prototypical urban refugee centre, located in Hillbrow, at the heart of Johannesburg’s eclectic foreign national communities. The centre is comprised of several emergency relief facilities, rehabilitative programmes as well as an adaptive form of transitional accommodation all encompasses within a spiritual, yet nondenominational Christian church establishment; a gesture which serves to highlight the ‘curative’ relationship between the spirituality, architecture and the user.