Rethink Rebuild Society invites you to this new episode of the ONLINE series: Refugees, the Lived Experience:
Syrian Male Refugees , Masculinities and Home-making
A conversation with Dr Rik Huizinga
Monday 10 June 2024 at 7.30pm ONLINE
Join Zoom meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81619449898?pwd=9qx8SqnyFqxTxBZBzthyghApG2n7zc.1
Meeting ID: 816 1944 9898
Passcode: 922828
In this episode of the online series ‘Refugees: the Lived Experience’, Dr Rik Huizinga will present his doctoral research on homemaking experiences, practices and politics of young Syrian male refugees in the Netherlands. The talk will focus on Syrian male refugees’ gendered encounters with asylum and settlement by foregrounding various ways in which migration dispossess and ‘de-masculinises’ them.
Dr Huizinga will illustrate the ways in which migration disrupts many facets of everyday life and complicates feelings of home and prospect for a meaningful life. Then, as a counternarrative, he analyses a repertoire of masculinities that young Syrian men employ in their articulations of everyday experiences to actively overcome these challenges. The talk provides insights into the essential role of everyday places and local opportunities in carving out spaces of home in a new and unfamiliar society.
Rik Huizinga
Dr Rik Huizinga is an Assistant Professor in Urban Geography at the Human Geography and Spatial Planning Department of Utrecht University (UU), the Netherlands. His research draws upon debates in urban social and cultural geography to investigate new and problematic social and cultural relations in the context of globalisation, migration and societal change.
Rik Huizinga is an Assistant Professor in Urban Geography at the Human Geography and Spatial Planning Department of Utrecht University (UU), the Netherlands. His research draws upon debates in urban social and cultural geography to investigate new and problematic social and cultural relations in the context of globalisation, migration and societal change.
Rik’s main areas of research include topics around gender, masculinity and intersectionality; refugees, migration and settlement; and young people, identity and equality. He is also interested in issues related to qualitative and participatory methods such as positionality, reflexivity and research ethics. His work draws attention to the ways in which structural forms of marginalisation (ageism, racism, sexism, capitalism) shape peoples’ everyday lives and highlights the variegated forms of resistance people display to counter exclusionary practices.
His doctoral dissertation ‘Making Home in Forced Displacement: Young Syrian Men Navigating Geographies of Migration, Masculinities and Belonging’ applies a relational and intersectional perspective to study the gendered politics of home after forced resettlement.
