Emma Kent, second-year LBJ School of Public Affairs Master’s student, is working with Dr. Paula Newberg (Dept. of Government) on a model for implementing refugee policy into the U.S. foster care system. This research is done under the Brumley NextGen Fellows program, and she chats about it and more with us here:
Strauss Center: Could you go into detail on the work you’re doing with Dr. Newberg, and how she’s aided you?
Emma: I began the year working through guided readings on issues related to refugees and producing a regular reading journal. Out of these readings, I developed an interest in child evacuation and temporary fostering as methods of protecting vulnerable children in conflict areas. Children in war zones can only be fostered with American families if they have applied for asylum or resettlement as unaccompanied minors.
This creates perverse incentives for children to make dangerous journeys to the U.S. or Europe alone. Children on these journeys are often the victims of abduction, theft, trafficking, and assault, but thousands still leave each year because families in war zones calculate that their children are safer making border crossings than staying where they are. My study examines whether it is possible to augment current U.S. fostering programs for unaccompanied minors with an evacuation-based model and the potential benefits and costs this model would provide to U.S. refugee programs.
Dr. Newberg has been an excellent resource, guiding my studies and helping me refine my research topic. She’s also helped me with career advice and suggested useful places and people I can turn to for further career guidance.
Emma spent six and a half months after high school working with Canada World Youth (CWY) in Ukraine.
SC: Could you tell us about your experience in CWY in Ukraine?
EK: Canada World Youth (CWY) is unique because it’s more participatory than most programs that take youth from developed countries to volunteer in developing regions. The CWY model pairs groups of nine Canadian youth with nine youth from another country and then assigns the entire team to volunteer projects in both Canada and the developing country. I appreciate this model because it teaches youth from both countries about community engagement at home and around the world.
SC: You spent a semester studying abroad in Cuba in 2013 and ended up researching development there. Can you go into that a bit more?
EK: While I was there, I was fascinated by the mass government organizations of which most Cubans are members. For example, up to 87% of women in Cuba are members of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), which gathers regularly to discuss neighbourhood issues and, in a more sinister vein, keep track of potential dissidents.
International development is increasingly focused on participatory, community-driven development, and I was interested in how regular, though often coerced, participation in these organizations would affect the way Cuba approached the kinds of domestic issues that development agencies typically focus on. After the semester ended, I was awarded a research grant to return to Cuba and interview Cubans about how the FMC was attempting to address domestic violence. It was a challenging experience traversing the interview process in an authoritarian state, but I ultimately came away thinking the model had some positive components in terms of inclusive policy creation. You can read a bit more about the research project in this post I wrote for my university’s undergraduate magazine.
SC: What led to your interest in international development and refugee policy?
EK: It came out of my experiences traveling in Ukraine after high school. When I started CWY, I had a naive belief (that I think is shared by a lot of recent high school graduates) that I was well-equipped to go out and fix problems around the world. In the process of volunteering in a foreign community with the ostensible goal of “development”, I realized how few skills I had and how many things I did not know about the development process.
My focus on international development has been an attempt to answer some of those questions and develop skills so that next time I have an opportunity to contribute to a struggling community, I might be able to have a larger and more positive impact. I became interested in refugee policy specifically after my neighbours and I sponsored a family of eight Syrian refugees to come and live in our community. Helping this family settle into life in Canada, and hearing their stories about fleeing the war in Syria, prompted my focus on refugee policy. Unfortunately, stories about refugee suffering are featured on the news almost every day, and these stories are a constant motivation to learn and do more in this field.
SC: What’s in the future for you?
EK: I will be graduating with my Masters of Global Policy Studies next month. I’m getting married in June and I’m currently applying to jobs working in refugee policy. Hopefully I will be able to play a part in implementing durable solutions for the growing number of refugees around the world today.
SC: Thank you again Emma for speaking with us! We know that your contributions will greatly improve refugee policy and in turn their lives.