Agency of silence: Female Syrian refugee workers and the reconstitution of the post-war self

Abstract

This study explores the working lives of female refugees who, living in the backstreets of major cities in the Global South, are often inaccessible to research. Most were housewives before their exile but must now find paid work to support their children. This ethnographic study shows that the only employment available to these women is domestic work and cleaning – occupations that are doubly stigmatised in their tradition and threaten their desire to rebuild honourable selves destroyed by war and displacement. Drawing on the work of the poststructuralist anthropologist Saba Mahmood, I argue that these refugee women reconstitute honourable selves through the agency of silence. I illustrate how, through agentive practices of silence – such as invisibility, concealment, renaming and refusal to speak – these female refugees protect their deeply desired valorised status while performing stigmatised work. In exploring the reconstitution of the honourable post-war self through the agency of silence, this study (i) makes a feminist contribution to the emerging field of refugee studies within management thought by extending understanding of female refugee agency in the Global South and (ii) develops the theory of the agency of silence that enables the reconstitution of the self, thereby advancing scholarship on organisational silence.