Exploring integration from the perspective of refugee women
Refugee women report a feeling of living life "in standby-mode".
Perspectives from Berlin shine a light on the effects of legal status, language, ethnicity, gender and caregiving responsibilities combined on participation in health, work and education.
Manuel Guerrero is a researcher at Uppsala University’s Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics.
Refugee women are expected to “integrate”, but structural barriers can create unfavourable conditions. Using a modified Story Dialogue Method and an intersectional lens, a recent publication in Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies examines this tension through dialogue workshops with 20 refugee women from China, Gambia, Iran, Nigeria, Ukraine, and Vietnam living in Berlin.
According to the authors, three findings stand out: the central role of trust and solidarity in everyday life; the recurring pain of being “othered” in healthcare and educational settings; and what one participant called “stand-by mode” — the experience of being capable, educated, and willing to contribute, but held back by bureaucratic and structural barriers.
The authors argue that intersectionality is not only an analytical category but an ethical demand on institutions: health and social care systems built without attention to overlapping inequalities reproduce them. The authors also document how solidarity practices among refugee women, sharing information, accompanying one another through institutional encounters, operate as a quiet form of resistance and as a resource for health and well-being.
“For research ethics and bioethics, the study raises questions about whose voices shape health systems, how cultural and structural competence should figure in the training of health professionals, and what it means to design policy that recognises refugee women as co-creators of society rather than passive recipients of aid,” says Manuel Guerrero, researcher at Uppsala University’s Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics and one of the authors.
By Anna Holm Bodin
Scheer, S., Guerrero, M., Asaba, E., Bürk, T., & Mondaca, M. (2026). Living in Stand-by Mode While Constructing Lived Citizenship. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 1–17. DOI: 10.1080/15562948.2026.2665108