Counter-narratives of coping and becoming: Karen refugee women’s inside/outside figured worlds

The purpose of our research is to understand the socially and culturally constructed architecture within which refugee women produce and negotiate identity. This ethnographic case study discusses findings from data collected through participant observation and informal interviews in two refugee camps along the Thai-Burma border. As Karen refugee women described their positionality within and negotiation between the socially constructed Inside and Outside Figured Worlds of the refugee camp, they depict the negotiation of a hybrid Third Space. Created at the intersection of the refugee camp structures that dominate individual agency and the discourses of gender and displacement that influence the social practices of women, this third space is characterized by the response strategies Karen women engage to support individual, family, and community health. Within the transformational spaces that refugee women constructed, the processes of coping and becoming reflected the relationship between structure and agency. Within these intersections a woman could express her resistance to a system that in its design represented a majority she was not a part of. As Karen refugee women moved to redesign their position within these systems, shifts in meaning of cultural norms resulted, inclusive of those that influence or define the role of women.     

Imagining Kawthoolei: Strategies of petitioning for Karen statehood in Burma in the first half of the 20th century

Academic and media writing about the Karen ethnic group in Myanmar most often associates the group with war and insurgency. This article focuses instead on the different strategies and rhetorical arguments––and the ideological notions that underpinned them––adopted by the Karen in their informal and formal petitions for recognition and statehood from the early decades of the 20th century, through the Second World War, to the mid‐1950s, including previously unexamined evidence of an early Karen attempt to gain UN recognition. In following these efforts, we track imaginings of Karen nationhood over time through shifting and conflicting territorial claims and persistent, multifaceted diplomatic attempts to realize the material existence of the Karen homeland, Kawthoolei.