Refugees and Astronauts: Commonalities

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Today is World Refugee Day, so I thought I would take a step back from Space for a minute. For those that didn’t know, the majority of the work that I’ve done so far has been with refugees and asylum seekers. But wait, what do refugees and astronauts have to do with each other? Well, this presents a really great opportunity to discuss commonalities and what we can learn from similar themes in different contexts. Along the way, I’ll tell you about some of the projects that I worked on, how you can get involved or find out more, and maybe inspire you to help if you can. I’ll also show how those projects all thread together to make the current study, and what this study can offer all of those previous projects.

Before I started undergrad, I’d been volunteering with the International Rescue Committee, which led to me being an English language partner with Jesuit Worldwide Learning, and at the same time working at the San Diego Museum of Us. At this point, I’d already been moved to go to university by the realization that people (media, officials, journalists) were talking about forced migration, but in large part were not talking to forced migrants. I wanted to change that, to go where they were and hear their stories. These institutions all helped me to learn about the lives of refugees and asylum seekers, the social realities of displacement, and the power of just showing up to help. To paraphrase a good friend of mine from these projects, “People think they don’t have anything to offer, but they do. You can write, you can make a resume, and you can speak English! Those are all so valuable, all you have to do is show up and listen and help.”

The first real project that I started was an analysis of a documentary called ‘Nowhere to Hide’. This is when I first started digging into storytelling and the power of giving the camera to the asylum seeker. My paper was titled, “The Lens and Who Holds It”. In it, I came to two conclusions: 1) objective observations by researchers simply cannot comprehend the situations of forced migrants in the same way that subjective reporting by the migrants themselves can; and 2) that through creating a cohesive narrative of the events of their displacement, migrants create themselves as a character in those narratives as a way to process and understand trauma. In other words, creating one cohesive story of their journey can be deeply informative and bring therapeutic clarity to asylum seekers.

My first big project with extensive interviews and partnerships was in collaboration with Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. In particular, I was working with civil journalists and documentarians, people Rohingya who were trying to document their flight from violence and the conditions that they lived in, while also displaying the humanity and richness of their lives in order to combat ‘suffering subject’ narratives. Omar’s Film School and Rohingya Photography, as well as a host of individual freelancers, were spearheading this effort, which was taking place almost entirely online. This was a natural step up from ‘Nowhere to Hide’, with the Rohingya community not just comprehending their journey, but using subjective storytelling to agentively enact change and grant each other rights. A second, and crucial part of this project for me, was understanding the impact that foreign journalists had on previous generations of Rohingya refugees already living in Cox’s Bazar, and how that was passed on to the newcomer generation of refugees.

This carried over into my master’s dissertation, which drew on five years of working with Jesuit Worldwide Learning to develop English skills in a mixed refugee community in Jordan. My experiences with my Rohingya contacts had me wondering how people in emergency situations can be thrown into identity crises as old rules are re-evaluated, and what was the impact of people from different cultures who were similarly re-evaluating their own concepts of how they fit into the world around them. It’s pretty easy to say that being forced to flee your home changes you, but there was no real concept of how those extreme journeys reconstruct who you are. In the case of forced migrants, they may spend months, years, or generations migrating, continually having to adapt to new communities, new rules, and new realities. I conducted a heap of interviews and reflected on years of knowing at least a couple hundred members of these communities. I also employed a new method, of having my contacts produce a work of art (in any form, fashion, and interpretation they wanted) that expressed their identity.

My work eventually led me to two conclusions: 1) Journeys can be conceptualized as prolonged rituals. Migrants are taken from one context, stripped of the rules that define that reality, and go through experiences that will inform and reform them to emerge as something else. 2) because these refugees were going through this ritual together, they formed extremely close bonds despite any prior animosity and created a cosmopolitan, global citizen identity. That is to say, people from all over the world who were stripped of their identities came together to stitch together a new one from the bits of themselves that they contributed to the group. This project was entitled, “Patchwork Identities”.

I have other projects that are ongoing, but that brings me, more or less, to analogue astronauts. So, what are the common threads? Analogue astronauts, while not being forced from their homes, are going on extreme ‘journeys’ with others from around the world. The normal rules will be suspended and they will have to make difficult decisions for their survival. Close cooperation will be essential for their survival, and their efforts to grant each other rights and agency (perhaps against nature more than governments), may create strong bonds. They will be completely alienated, removed entirely from their home contexts. If we consider this a stepping stone toward studying astronauts in space, we can see how those commonalities become even more extreme. Methodologically, I will be working remotely, just as I had with the Rohingya and Jordanian communities. I will also be asking them to produce art and narratives in writing to synthesize their experiences, let them “hold the lens”, and gain access to their subjective experiences in addition to our objective observations.

As this is World Refugee Day, I want to end by reflecting on how working with analogue astronauts can assist in refugee work. Humans tend to function in predictable patterns, and we can learn a lot from what is consistent, as well as what is inconsistent, in themes across different scenarios and in different contexts. In the same way that each previous study informs this one, Space Health can help inform future studies with refugees and even retrospectively help in understanding or critiquing previous research. That is The Goal.