Refugee-Led Advocacy: Embedded Knowledges as a Source for Epistemic Multiplicity
摘要
Refugees are often studied as objects of policies and interventions and rarely as active political subjects. In this chapter, we investigate the role of emergent refugee led organizations and refugee advocates seeking to access political space to influence policies that affect their lives and communities, through the lens of epistemic multiplicity. We examine the conditions under which refugee led advocacy can increase epistemic multiplicity and epistemic justice in the Dutch context. Refugees’ knowledge, narratives, and experiences can enlarge the imaginative horizons of people in positions of power who are responsible for policies that affect refugees’ lives but are often disconnected from refugees’ lifeworlds. Such narratives can also enable the emergence of counter narratives that challenge implicit hegemonic structures reproducing exclusion and marginalization of refugees and migrants. This chapter is based on a theoretically and empirically informed reflective dialogue between four authors differently positioned across generations of refugee led advocacy in the Netherlands, and critically engaged scholarship on refugee inclusion. It elaborates the key lessons we have learned through collaborative work on a co creative research project examining the role of refugee led advocacy in the Netherlands.