This subject examines the context, value and purpose of refugee experience as it is written, spoken and recorded. It critically examines the processes of producing narratives of experience that are essential for obtaining refugee status but which must also be understood as a process of interpretation by others. This subject looks at how, when and why refugee testimony is produced and what narrative forms it takes. The subject engages with the various institutions, individuals and communities which deploy refugee experience and these include amongst others, the autobiographical, the therapeutic, the governmental and the family. This subject examines the status of experience and the production of refugee subjectivity and engages critically with post colonial critiques of narration, the right to narrate and postmodern conceptions of power as productive.
No offerings have been identified for this subject in 2020.
HD/FL
One session
Australian Graduate School of Policing and Security
- contemporary appreciation of what constitutes a narrative or testimony - postcolonial critiques of narration - critiques of testimony as single truth - narratives of self and the production of subjectivities - the ethical imagination and the function of narrative - representation and assertion of particular refugee claims - interview and response of refugees as a function of the state - the operation of doubt and truth within testimony as cultural productions - refugee status as a partial truth - oral versus written refugee histories - ethical implications of creating refugee narrative and testimony - the status and political operation of autobiography - refugee narratives within a medical, therapeutic and government context
The information contained in the CSU Handbook was accurate at the date of publication: October 2020. The University reserves the right to vary the information at any time without notice.