Religion, Spirituality, and the Refugee Experience in Melbourne, Australia 1990s-2010

An in-depth study of selected refugees from Ethiopia, Iraq, Somalia and Sudan, this book examines the relationship between the refugees' religious and spiritual beliefs and the refugee experience. Susan P. Ennis takes a close look at the circumstances of refugees' flight, their asylum, and their initial period of settlement in Melbourne, Australia during the period between the 1990s and the early twenty-first century. Ennis finds that a sense of religiosity seemed to aid the refugees, in some way, during all stages of their journey. Furthermore, nearly half of the refugees she studied reported a shift in their religiosity over the course of their emigration. Based on her research, Ennis puts forward a framework of religiosity and the refugee experience based on shifting typologies at each stage of the refugee journey.

Susan Ennis has coordinated and taught English language programs to newly arrived adult refugees/immigrants in Melbourne, Australia for over thirty years. She has also taught in Turkey, China (during the Tiananmen Square incident), Cambodia (during the UN mandate), and Israel.