Katy Fulfer

Philosophy in the world

You are here: Home / Research

Research

From Rootlessness to Belonging: An Arendtian Critique of the Family as a Structure of Refugee Assimilation

(with Rita A. Gardiner, Faculty of Education, Western University)

In December 2016, following the US presidential election, Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism was selling at 16 times its typical rate in the US. This fact seems to suggest that people are discovering Arendt’s philosophy to offer a relevant and needed intervention in political discourse.

Writing in the aftermath of World War Two, Arendt traces conditions that enable totalitarian regimes to emerge and demonstrates how these conditions negatively affect human freedom, especially for refugees and stateless persons. Scholars have drawn on Arendt to problematize the actions of state leaders and the bureaucratic management of refugees in the international arena, but less attention has been given to how political communities welcome refugees once they resettle.

As evidenced by the popularity of initiatives such as the private sponsorship program, welcoming refugees into the Canadian family is of great public interest. This project offers a reinterpretation of Arendt’s conceptions of rootlessness and assimilation to shed light on how refugees may face barriers to political inclusion after they resettle in Canada. Our primary objectives are to:

  1. Illuminate how Arendt’s critique of the family enhances our understanding of the problems of rootlessness and assimilation for refugees.
  2. Apply insights from feminist phenomenology and refugee studies to enrich Arendt’s treatment of assimilation and identity.

With respect to the first objective, Arendt’s critique of assimilation and her description of rootlessness (“We Refugees,” Origins) prefigure her critique of the family (The Human Condition). Although problems with bureaucracy and instrumental thinking appear in both critiques, scholars treat them separately. We will argue that they are interconnected. To foster inclusion for refugees, it is crucial to distinguish between the use of societal norms that Arendt associates with the family in Western thought (e.g., hierarchical dominance, inequality, sameness) to structure inclusion and Arendt’s description of political belonging as ‘being at home in the world.

Our second objective responds to feminist criticism that Arendt’s philosophy is limited in capturing diverse modes of experience, especially in relation to gender and race. Bringing insights from feminist phenomenology (especially through the work of Sara Ahmed and Mariana Ortega) and refugee studies on the multiplicity of experience to revise Arendt’s approach to assimilation enables us to theorize the complexity of refugees’ identity formation in a twenty-first century context.

This project is funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2018-2020). 

Surrogacy in Canada

My interest in the family also extends to my work in reproductive ethics. I am interested in the ethical and political dimensions of individuals choosing to pursue transnational contract pregnancy (arguably a neocolonial enterprise) as a means of assisted reproduction. I am also interested in what gift narratives (i.e., narratives about how and whether contract pregnancy is “a gift”) might tell us about the ethical limits of a pregnancy contract, and what kind of political and moral relationship exists between Global Southern gestational laborers and Global Northern reproductive travelers.

The Commodification of Animals

With Patrick Clipsham (Philosophy, Winona State University), I am exploring an anti-commodification approach to animal ethics, which theorizes commodification as a distinct harm or wrong in how we treat nonhuman animals. Currently we are examining what an anti-commodification approach might bring to questions in business ethics. Our past work in this area has defended veganism.

Recent publications