Browsing by Subject "Relationship Management"

This research delves into the experiences of staff or volunteers and asylum seekers or refugees making relationships with each other in three locations, Finland, Ireland and Greece. Both of the former countries are understudied locations in this area, and offer different perspectives to areas experiencing larger-scale asylum applications or immigration such as Greece, which has been particularly well-studied since 2015. The focus on the relationships in and of themselves is a novel perspective. This ethnographic research utilises interviews and the author’s own observational experiences in addition to the Irish comparative case study. The thesis concentrates on the meaning of these interactions to individuals involved and how they managed these relationships in a context of social distance created by the social political conditions of their meeting. Key results include ambivalence in the research participants’ emotions resulting in a layered experience of their relationships, as well as the extremity of the context of their relationship-making, which my ethnographic fieldwork suggests contributed to the intensity of the relationships. I also suggest that making meaningful relationships is a way of creating forward motion in the lives of asylum seekers, and explore how different strategies are used by the research participants to overcome social distance. The study concludes that the particular context in which the research participants developed relationships made close bonds somewhat inevitable, illustrating the benefits of intimacy in this context. Using the concepts of biopower, boundary-making and bureaucratic violence, this study also illustrates how long arm of the state intervenes in intimate relations.