PRFDHR Seminar: Program on Refugees, Forced Displacement, and Humanitarian Responses
Description: How do men engage with their families in contexts of forced displacement? Engaging with men as fathers is important for sustaining initiatives that seek to build cultures of peace, equity, and social inclusion. It is also important for designing interventions that enhance family cohesion, mental health, and child development. Yet in research and policy, the “father factor” has been all too often ignored. Professor Catherine Panter-Brick begins this talk with a policy brief that gives concrete examples of community-level interventions engaging with fathers to build social change. She then outlines current research with Syrian refugee families, undertaken in Jordan at the invitation of Taghyeer, a non-profit foundation focused on social entrepreneurship and education. Together with colleagues, they assessed the extent to which fathers engaged with their family and community, linked discrepancies in spousal reports to family dynamics, and evaluated family-level impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their work contributes to a small number of studies that have focused on men as fathers, their family-directed behaviors, and family-level pandemic impacts in refugee communities.
Catherine Panter-Brick is the Bruce A. and Davi-Ellen Chabner Professor of Anthropology, Health, and Global Affairs at Yale University. A medical anthropologist trained in human biology and the social sciences, she holds appointments in the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, the Department of Anthropology, and the School of Public Health.