ABSTRACT
Resettlement is not a neutral or inherently benevolent process. The suite of services that are provided to refugees upon their settlement in Australia to support their welfare and well-being is one of the most extensive systems of settlement support in the world. However, such institutions of settlement support also act as disciplining structures through which refugees are supposed to learn and internalise dominant logics of economic productivity and neoliberal time that guide how societal membership is valued in Australia. In this chapter, Ramsay describes how this emphasis on individual productivity, as measured in economic terms, does not necessarily correspond to the cosmological logics of regeneration that guide how refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other regions of Central Africa approach and organise their everyday lives following resettlement. Ramsay develops the concept of “cosmological friction” to describe the experience of having temporal trajectories and ontological ways of being rejected and problematised. Ramsay considers that experiences of cosmological friction are imposed on particular kinds of subjects, such as refugees from Africa, as a means of temporal dominance through which to inculcate them into particular ways of living and, ultimately,to punish those who fail to conform.
