ABSTRACT
What does it mean to experience refuge? In this chapter, Ramsay shows that refuge is not a distinct event but is a process that is constituted for refugees over time across different contexts of asylum and resettlement. Refuge is not simply an experience of feeling safe in the present, Ramsay explains, but is the ability to feel in control over, and to secure, futures of possibility. For many refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other regions in Central Africa, the experience of refuge is intimately linked to the ability to create and reconstitute social relations, specifically, through having children. However, new configurations of everyday life in Australia gradually disintegrate the social basis of refuge for many refugees resettled there. The domestic domains in which children are raised in resettlement are not neutral havens, immune from the impacts of settling in a new and unfamiliar country. New pressures and expectations related to gender, marriage, and parenting challenge what were once taken-for-granted arrangements of family life. Such new household orders throw the very possibility of creating refuge in Australia into jeopardy.
