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Abstract
This thesis examines the dynamics of the first-ever resettlement of Bhutanese refugees, who entered Australia under the Humanitarian Programme. Only a few empirical studies of humanitarian care focus on the micro-physics of routine interactions of the initial resettlement phase. This thesis seeks to chart their transformative effects. The Bhutanese have come to Australia with hopes and dreams, yet in this new space, existential realities find expression of their past curtailed and ensuing social interactions imbued with affective disjunctures.
The research for this thesis was conducted in Australia and the majority of it with one particular service provider organisation, where an extended period of fieldwork enabled participant observation of the everyday resettlement activities and interviews with a range of people. The empirical material is divided according to different focal aspects: the Bhutanese, the service providers and the dynamics or interactions that overtly include the anthropologist herself.
Resettlement in Australia is a government-tendered service implemented by non-governmental organisations. In this space, service providers enact their own fantasies, whereas for the Bhutanese resettlement constitutes a desired imaginary to transcend refugee status. Stories of this transition highlight a conditional compassion towards the refugees informed by, as much as it invokes, particular circulating narratives, images and histories. The thesis asserts that these processes enable and engender compassionate condescension in which the moral imperative to act is accompanied by practices of containment. Navigating these spaces, reveals an entanglement between different rationalities, which are explored through a nuanced understanding of intersubjectivity, of how selves are formed in and through relations with others. Rather than reproducing canonical perspectives and hegemonic forms of othering, such writing attempts a contrapuntal analysis from interstitial spaces, the fissures created by displacements, to articulate the dynamics operative in these experiences and captured from insights of being in the blind-spots of academic thought. The conclusion emphasises how investigating the multiple interfaces of humanitarian resettlement requires a deeper understanding of subjectivity and intersubjectivity to enable theorising ethnography from the interstices and to illuminate cartographies of resettlement and their ontological uncertainties of certainty.