Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford where she was also a Research Associate at the Refugee Studies Centre. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Fee applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Believing in Light after Darkness: Displacement and Refugee Resettlement, and shared the following:
From page 99:Visit Molly Fee's website.Toussaint noted that “resettlement [in the] US is a good solution for refugees,” but the extent of the adjustment “makes refugees to feel uncomfortable.”… The experience of early resettlement is complicated by the fact that gratitude and disappointment can exist simultaneously. While refugees may know that resettlement is the best outcome for their families, it can be difficult to reconcile this knowledge with feelings of dissatisfaction. The realities of financial insecurity, minimum wage jobs, and poor housing complicate prior notions of what resettlement will be.The Page 99 Test does a remarkable job of capturing the main argument of my book. While U.S. refugee resettlement offers refugees a tremendous opportunity to leave behind the challenges of forced migration, limited rights, and food insecurity, it nonetheless comes with new and unexpected hardships that weigh heavily on recently arrived refugees. My book reveals the numerous tensions and contradictions that shape the experience of resettling in a new country. Based on over 1,000 hours of ethnographic fieldwork and over 100 interviews with refugees and service providers in San Diego, CA and Boise, ID, I explain how understanding resettlement as another displacement more accurately captures the complexities of refugees’ experiences. Even if it is ultimately a “good” and wanted displacement, resettlement is profoundly disruptive to refugees’ lives. This page manages to encapsulate the book’s overall contribution that resettlement to countries like the U.S. can simultaneously be the best outcome for refugees while also being disorienting and even disappointing.
Importantly this page also notes how this reality of displacement is fully understood by the Resettlement Agency service providers who support newly arrived refugees on a daily basis. As noted on page 99, “A casework staff member in Boise struggled with how best to convey to new clients that their lives were going to get a lot worse before they got better.” These service providers understand intimately the myriad challenges that their refugee clients will face, starting from the day of their arrival in the U.S. My book seeks to show how both refugees and service providers navigate the complicated terrain of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, doing their best despite insufficient funds and significant obstacles.
--Marshal Zeringue
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