The Road We Don’t Know – The Refugees Stories Cover Image

Droga, której nie znamy – opowieści uchodźcze
The Road We Don’t Know – The Refugees Stories

Author(s): Kala Dobosz
Subject(s): Social Sciences, Sociology, Migration Studies
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu w Białymstoku
Keywords: Sri Lanka civil war; biographical metod; stages of a refugee’s life; narrative strategy

Summary/Abstract: The presented story, which the reader and the reader will find in the text (when I am silent), comes from interviews collected during my research in the Netherlands in 2013. The research problem I chose at that time – the issue of the identity of Tamils from Sri Lanka in the Netherlands – I decided to investigate using a modified version of the biographical method, which is increasingly used in sociological research. Such a model of analysis is common today also in studies on migration processes, and especially in studies on the problem of refugee. Using this method, in the analytical part, I present the refugee life cycle based on the schema of the rituals of passage by Arnold van Gennep. Therefore, I use a model drawn from anthropological research, namely the pattern of individuals going through certain stages in their development and in the process of social functioning. After the first part, where I outline the research methodology and the main theoretical assumptions, I provide a first-person narrative of one of the people who left Sri Lanka, and her life was inextricably intertwined with the local nearly 30-year civil war.

  • Issue Year: 15/2021
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 13-39
  • Page Count: 27
  • Language: Polish