Speaking Refugee. The VULNER Podcast

To buy food, have a home for your family and pay for an education for your kids - you will need money. So let’s talk about it! And to broaden the perspective a little, we will talk about capital in general. Money is certainly an important type of capital - but not the only one.

Thinking with the quite famous French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, there are more kinds of capital than just money. Besides the economic capital, which is indeed the money you own or inherit, Bourdieu also defines cultural and social capital.

Bourdieu said: „The cultural capital is the cultural knowledge that serves as currency, that helps us navigate culture and alters our experiences and the opportunities available to us.“

Fatima told us about Syrian people trying their best to be strong together, although the status of Syrian refugees in Lebanon is really hard right now.

Humanitarian aid workers or social workers all over the world, like Fatima and many others - they try their best to make up for missing social capital. Teachers like Gabriel, who teaches a language and the rights all refugees have in Uganda, try to support others in building their own cultural capital. But as we have seen in Lebanon: When the country itself struggles massively on the economic level, it affects the most vulnerable members of society first.

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This project has received funding from the European Union‘s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870845.

This Podcast was produced by hauseins.fm

The Covid 19 pandemic has left a mark - it made it harder to get medical support during the lockdowns and it also left many people with mental health problems.

Mental Health has always been a struggle for many many refugees. Many of them have had traumatizing experiences - either in their home countries, or on their journey.

Vulnerabilities are interconnected. Many of the topics we focus on in this podcast, such as a home, food supply or support for women and girls can intersect with each other and many of them lead to a vulnerability regarding their health.

We talked to Gabriel, Fatima and Jameela about health and we had a look into the VULNER reports on Uganda, Lebanon and Belgium that show the research done by scientists regarding health issues in refugee settlements and camps.

Many international treaties have focussed on womens’ rights and the protection of girls, such as the UN Security Council Resolution 1325, which addresses the impact of war on women or the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), adopted in 1979 by the UN General Assembly. Protecting women's’ rights on a global level has been the United Nations’ aim for several decades now. And it is still important. Until today, gender can play a great role in constituting a person’s vulnerability. Especially in the context of forced migration.

Gender - next to other factors, such as health or age - plays a central role at different levels, when vulnerabilities are being assessed in reception centers and by social workers. And: When we talk about gender, it is very important to talk about cultural discrimination and to look at stereotypes and a very long history of gender oppression.

Speaking Refuge - The VULNER Podcast is part of the VULNER project. It is carried out by an international research consortium involving partners from 9 research institutions located in 6 different countries. It is led by Luc Leboeuf from the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.

Food is the fuel of every living creature on this planet. We need it to have energy for our daily duties and to maintain life itself. Children need it to grow and be healthy. Food can also be a central part of family or cultural life and food can make us happy. It brings people together at one table. It is a very important part of all the rituals that shape our lives: A cake for our birthday, a wedding buffet or the funeral feast, when someone died. We connect over food. We share our food with people who we call family and friends.

But food can also be a part of our daily struggles and sorrows. The World Food Programme estimates, that 345 million people are facing acute food insecurity in 82 countries for 2022.

In Lebanon the VULNER research shows, that many refugees suffer from food insecurity. The „Vulnerability Assessment of Syrian Refugees in Lebanon“, or short „VASYR 2021“ showed that food security was one of the main challenges for Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Fatima tells us about a project that aims to help: Food Baskets.

But food itself can be a part of resilience too. Because food is very often connected to family and community rituals. Having a good breakfast can be part of your start in a good and productive day, as Gabriel tells us. In Uganda, there is a very common dish, called Posho. "Posho and beans is the common food that everyone can easily get. It is the food that every refugee is given for survival", sais Gabriel.

The VULNER report on Belgium showed that "The asylum seekers are not able to decide what to eat and when to eat. In the reception centres, there is usually no private or common kitchen to share for the residents." This results in a phenomenon called "food stress" - we will talk about the meaning of this and to Jameela, who had problems with Belgium food because she was pregnant and her blood sugar went up.

In the upcoming episodes we will talk about vulnerabilities and resilience strategies around gender, capital and health. We hope you’ll be with us again.

This project has received funding from the European Union‘s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870845.

In this episode we will be talking about the meaning of family. As we learnt last time, when talking about home, family plays a very important role in terms of feeling secure or even happy. To many people it is the primary place where they feel attachment, nurturance and love. For both, Gabriel and Jameela, feeling at home was deeply connected to their

Fatima reports, that children are more in danger of becoming most vulnerable - especially when they are orphaned, were separated from their families or live in a family with no legal residency status. We have heard of child headed families, child labour and malnutrition.

In Jameela tells how challenging the single fact of beeing alone can be. And the same accounts for her sister back in Afghanistan. Both caretakers without helping hands - both left alone with a lot of responsibility. At least they can talk on the phone.

And Gabriel’s story is a success story to him, because he has his own family now and that changed his life. The vulnerability that he has to face: He worries that he will not be able to afford his daughter a good education.

This was the second of six episodes of „Speaking Refugee - The VULNER Podcast“. In the upcoming episodes we will explore more facets of vulnerability, like food, gender, capital or health. We will do this together with Fatima, Gabriel and Jameela. We hope you’ll be with us again.

This project has received funding from the European Union‘s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870845.

Home has a different meaning for everyone and we will talk to Fatima, Gabriel and Jameela about their home or homes and their stories of vulnerability in connection with feeling or not feeling at home, missing home or making a strange place their home.

This podcast is a part of the VULNER project, a research project that aims to understand the vulnerabilities faced by migrants, to enable decision-makers to better identify positions of vulnerabilities and address them.

In this podcast we try to focus on the individual experiences and feelings, that constitute the „vulnerabilities“ of refugees and that are often overlooked and not so clear.

We talked to three people from three different countries: You will meet Jameela, who is a refugee from Afghanistan and currently in an accommodation centre in Belgium. Gabriel, who has a refugee history himself and is now working with refugees in Uganda. And we talked to Fatima, a humanitarian worker in the MENA region with Basmeh and Zeitooneh – one of the areas of concentration is Lebanon.

And we focus on six different topics - each topic will be part of an episode. Starting with home, we will explore more facets of vulnerability in the upcoming episodes, like family, food, gender or health. We will do this together with Fatima, Gabriel and Jameela. We hope you’ll be with us again.

This project has received funding from the European Union‘s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870845.

The VULNER project’s research aims to understand the vulnerabilities faced by migrants to enable decision-makers to better identify situations of vulnerabilities and address them. For this purpose, the VULNER research teams have conducted fieldwork, to reach a better understanding of the vulnerabilities as lived by the migrants themselves. They met with social workers and mingled with migrants.

In this podcast we will talk about the findings of the research teams in Uganda, Belgium and Lebanon. It will Start on Thursday, December 1st. You can listen to it wherever you listen to your podcasts.

More information on the VULNER project: www.vulner.eu/

This project has received funding from the European Union‘s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870845.