Understanding how women refugees and asylum seekers survive different public health crises

In this blog we hear from Irish Research Council DOROTHY MSCA COFUND awardee Dr Amanda Lubit on her research investigating how recent global crises affects displaced women refugees and asylum seekers who are considered to be one of the most vulnerable populations in society.

In recent years, global crises have increased in frequency with each year bringing new emergencies. Most dramatically, COVID and subsequent worldwide lockdowns brought new levels of public awareness to the threat posed by various hazards. Although the scale of this emergency was unprecedented, it was just one of many emergencies impacting multiple nations and large populations in recent years. Others include recent economic crises; human crises like refugee surges due to war and conflict; governance crises like Brexit; infectious diseases like Avian Influenza or Mpox; and disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), an estimated 300 million people worldwide will require humanitarian assistance and protection in 2024 alone. The three main drivers of worldwide crisis are conflict, climate, and economics. The interaction of these three forces has exacerbated the modern problem of forced displacement.

Recent experience demonstrates that crises cause extensive social and economic damage, with long-term consequences. Consider the recent example of COVID-19 and its many consequences. This includes the loss of social connections, healthcare shortages, loss of trust in governments, rising housing costs, worsening poverty and hunger, high inflation, and many other ongoing inequities. As this example demonstrates, crises tend to overlap with one another, making these very complex problems to understand and address. To better prepare for and respond to future emergencies, research is needed to identify how real people experience crisis.

This project responds to this need by considering how recent crises affect one of the most vulnerable populations in society, displaced women refugees and asylum seekers. As of 2022, the Republic of Ireland hosted over 61,000 refugees and asylum seekers. As of 2023, Northern Ireland hosted over 3,200 refugees and asylum seekers.

It is important to consider displaced women separate from men because they experience more violence, isolation and exclusion due to their gender. Pre-existing two-tiered asylum systems exist across Ireland, one tier granting additional rights, services and status to those who arrive through international resettlement schemes (e.g. Syrian and Ukrainian), leaving the other more vulnerable, non-resettled refugees (e.g. Africans) with different systems to navigate. Additionally, research and public policy also disproportionately focus upon resettled refugees. By focusing upon non-resettled women, the project focuses upon the most precarious and excluded populations.

Displaced women are commonly excluded and invisible in research and policy on crisis. This project will enable participating women to share their own stories in their own voices, so that public policy can better support them going forward. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that public health crises disproportionately impact already marginalised populations like displaced women. Impacts are commonly gendered and racialised, meaning that they more severely affect minority women. In order to improve societal outcomes during future crises, research is needed on how the most vulnerable sectors of society are impacted and respond. Vulnerable individuals suffer most during times of crisis. For this reason, research and recommendations on displaced persons are vital to enable local, national, and international governmental and nongovernmental organisations to better prepare for future crises in advance.

Research will take place across Ireland, in the cities of Belfast (Northern Ireland), Dundalk (on the border) and Dublin (Republic of Ireland). By researching across the island’s international border, this project will benefit island-wide cohesion by identifying ways to better respond jointly to crises in the future.

Dr Lubit’s Irish host is Dublin City University’s School of Nursing, Psychotherapy and Community Health. For the first year-and-and-a-half of the fellowship, Dr Lubit will be hosted by Max Planck Institute (MPI) for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.

In Dr Lubit’s words: “Through this fellowship, I am making a connection between past experiences in the public sector and my more recent work in academia. I completed a PhD in anthropology from Queen’s University Belfast in 2022, having researched how Muslim women (many who identify as refugees and asylum seekers) make a place for themselves after migrating to Northern Ireland. Prior to this I obtained a masters’ degree in public health and then spent several years working on various public health crises in the United States and internationally (e.g. homelessness, HIV/AIDS in women, pandemic preparedness, and extreme weather events).

Going forward, I intend to conduct research aimed at guiding public policy to become more relevant, inclusive, and appropriate for the diverse communities affected by crises. To achieve this, I am building my interdisciplinary and international profile through involvement in the related but often separate fields of public health, migration and disaster studies. I will be attending this year’s European Public Health (EPH) Conference and presenting at next year’s International Migration, Integration and Social Cohesion in Europe (IMISCOE) Conference. Lastly, Berghahn Books is publishing my monograph on my previous research with migrant Muslim women in Northern Ireland, due out late 2024 to early 2025.”

Find out more about the MSCA DOROTHY Fellowship programme visit the website link below.

DOROTHY website