Center for Community Engagement

The helper-victim relationship is often seen in refugee narratives in which international humanitarian organizations are the helpers and refugees are the victims. However, in parallel to this model is the neglected story of refugee leaderships who have mobilized to provide support for their own community. In this research, partnered with Tiyya Foundation, a nonprofit organization for refugees and displaced Americans, we hope to change the existing narrative by shifting the focus from the mainstream model portrayed by western media bias to the often unseen resilient-leadership narrative. We utilized a community-engaged research approach to explore active engagement from the refugee community through secondary ethnographic interviews. We also conducted a newspaper-based content analysis and we found that media, depends on their political leaning, plays a major role in influencing the refugee story by consistently portrays the harmful narratives of refugees as criminals, security threats, or burdens which often translate into a racist immigration agenda and xenophobic behavior against the community. We hope that this research will help, in a small part, shed new light and bring in new positive refugee narratives.