Socio-Economic and Spatial Well-Being of Sub-Saharan African Refugees in Tucson, Arizona

Abstract

This study employs qualitative and visual methods to investigate the relationship among community gardening, well-being and place through the case of Sub-Saharan African refugees in Tucson, Arizona. It contributes to economic geography in the area of debt and financialization, showing that loans refugees take out for travel expenses to the US as they resettle in Tucson have an enormous impact on their lives, transforming refugees’ worldviews, attitudes about life, family, friendship and time, and daily practices, even their dispositions to act, think and feel in particular ways, while forcing them to defer training and education, resulting in chronic poverty. The study contributes to human geography by examining the effects of community garden participation on the social well-being of Sub-Saharan African refugees. I develop the concept of a well-being gap, a place occupied by many refugees that reflects the difference between their own values and norms about society, family and one’s role within it, and the comparatively narrow way well-being is usually described and perceived in the US, as comprised of material conditions and income at the individual level. Refugees’ spatial well-being is also defined and described. I argue that it is unhelpful to overly generalize about refugees and community gardens, because the impact of the gardens is very different depending on refugees’ urban or rural origin, their formal education, gender, and age, as well as how the community gardens are set up. The study contributes to visual methods and the geography of film, showing how video, specifically participatory video, often has a performative dimension, and can be used in geographic research as a source of data and a research output, while altering some of the power relations typical in social research.