Colombian women’s experiences of the Canadian refugee and asylum adjudication process

Camila N. Parra Carrillo, The University of Western Ontario

Abstract

The present thesis “Colombian women’s experiences of the Canadian refugee and asylum adjudication process” is an ethnographic description and analysis of the experiences of Colombian refugee women as they move through the refugee and asylum adjudication system in Ontario, Canada. Using concepts such as liminality, politics of waiting, hermeneutics of suspicion and arbitrariness, the refugee and asylum adjudication system is shown to be a site of power and domination that creates negative emotions in the people who face it, especially in the oral hearing as a central event in the process. Centering Colombian refugee women’s voices, their experiences and emotions are prioritized to construct a bottom-up approach that helps to understand the difficulties of being a refugee in the current moment and recent past.