Seminar
The year of 2015 marks a political shift towards encouraging temporary protection status and return of refugees in Denmark. As a result of security assessments of Damascus (2019) and Rural Damascus (2021), Syrian refugees who hold subsidiary protection statuses in this case have been a particular target group for the Danish Immigration Service’s re-examination of protection needs.
In this seminar jointly organized by Bergen Global and International Migration and Ethnic Relations Unit (IMER), Sarah-Louise Japhetson Mortensen will present findings from her 12 months ethnographic fieldwork among Syrian refugees in Denmark.
Her research traces the effects of temporality of protection on Syrian Refugees bodies and minds, which often manifests as nightmares, stress, depression, tremor, anxiety and sleeplessness. Addressing to the concept “Politics of exhaustion”, Mortensen discusses how exhaustion can be used as a strategic tool of governance and understood as lived experiences during her interlocutors’ daily navigations between protection needs.
Sarah-Louise Japhetson Mortensen is a visiting PhD scholar at the Center for Women and Gender Studies (SKOK) at University of Bergen. She is affiliated with the department of anthropology at Aarhus University in Denmark. Her PhD project is a part of the international and interdisciplinary research project “Temporary protection as a durable solution? The ‘return turn’ in asylum policies in Europe” (TemPro) at the Chr. Michelsen Institute.
