Social Class Savy

Naturally you're already thinking about how difference in ethnicity, culture, and language impact your work with refugees. And your OT models mention something about social environments as a contex influencing occupational opportunities, performance, and wellbeing. . . but beyond that, you might not have reflected on how social class is a dynamic reality present and active whether you're aware of it or not.

For example, refugees may be people living in poverty who happened to have the "wrong" ethnicity or religion and are consequently persecuted. Conversely, refugees may also be people who are "pillars of the community" who happen to be effective targets to achieve or maintain a predetermined power relations. So acting on unexamined class expectations associated with the "refugee label" may thwart efforts in subtle ways.

Examples of social class influencing refugee work

How you engage and negotiate goals may be influenced by awareness of how we assume a "future orientation" to help strive towards goals when poverty, disolaction, knowing you control little of your future, being consumes by daily survival - may have been a long standing realies undermining self efficacy and future orientation.

How you build trust, safety, credibility may be influenced by awareness that professionals may be seen as opposition, empty promises, or simply from a "different world" due to status, language, assumed "general" knowledge and "normal" experiences.

How you navigate a home visit may be influenced by awareness that a refugee may have been a middle or upper class in home country and now finds themselves stuck with shame and stigma of changed living circumstances, feircely craving to be treated as more than the sum of their material position. 

How you respond to budding refugee leaders might be influeced by awareness that just because they seem to have "made it", they may have internalised that they are not smart or good enough; living with anxiety about being "discovered", feel like an imposter in middle class work and social processes.

How you assess how "risky" an occupational opportunity is for a client may be influenced by awareness that having no money makes it easier to stick with what you know, and working to "pass off" as middle class means risking embarrassment of revealing deficiencies in "commonplace" knowledge and experience.

How you work with young refugee's aspirations might be influenced by awareness that youth have to navigate competing tensions - expected to "do better" than parents, but respecting their parents pride in their working-class heritage, and not forgetting where they came from or thinking they were better than anyone else.

How you respond to failed plans may be influenced by awareness of how social capital of close relationships could simply be more important that other commitments as these bonds are fundamental to daily survival when living amidst poverty and chronic instability.

How you make sense of the intense pride and grief surrounding loss of status and respect may be influenced by awareness that refugees may have been viewed with contempt by society at large, along each stage of the refugee journey (initial flight, camps, detention, settlment).

Refugees from different social classes don't lack social and cultural captital - they just have the "wrong" capital to escort them through social and structural processes domimnated by middle class vlaues, norms, skills, and commonplace understandings. We want to minimise feelings of being "outsiders tresspassing in someone else's land" by being aware of influences of social class whilst being immersed in it. Refugees can bring invaluable experiences demonstrating a rich resource of resilience, resourcefulness, pride, determination, and courage - making it in everyone's interest to have inclusive OT practice to enable more inclusive community participation.