Abstract
This thesis examines the complex experiences of child refugees through autobiographical publications, focusing on the Kindertransport and contemporary refugee movements. Three texts from each group are examined: Ruth Barnett’s Person of No Nationality: A Story of Childhood Separation, Loss and Recovery (2009), Lore Segal’s Other People’s Houses (1964), and Vera Gissing’s Pearls of Childhood (1988) addressing experiences of the Kindertransport, and Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil’s The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story about War and What Comes After (2018), Omar Mohamed and Victoria Jamieson’s When Stars are Scattered (2020), and Gulwali Passarlay’s The Lightless Sky: My Journey to Safety as a Child Refugee (2019) addressing contemporary refugeedoms, considered here as accounts of children who fled from varied conflicts from 1991 onwards. This thesis engages with the intimate lens through which child refugee autobiographies are written, applying affect and trauma theories alongside ideas of the construction of identity and space. In doing so, it shifts away from common representations in the media to consider the less visible everyday encounters which shape children’s overall experiences, placing international and political contexts in the background.The thesis is underpinned by the argument that children lack a comprehensive understanding of their experiences prior to and throughout refugeedom, and explores how this limited understanding contributes to an increased personalisation of events throughout their experiences. This is argued to permeate throughout children’s experiences, in instances of travel and transition, domestic spaces and interactions with community, and exert a long-lasting impact into adulthood. Patterns are argued to occur across all accounts, demonstrating the prominence of intimate experiences over the diverse external contexts in which they occur. This thesis calls for increased humanisation in media coverage of refugee experiences, and seeks to unite diverse accounts of refugeedom through common threads of personalisation and intimate perspectives, without asserting a singular version of refugeedom.
| Date of Award | 11 Dec 2025 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Christine Berberich (Supervisor) & Maggie Bowers (Supervisor) |