Resettlement organizations both enable better material realities for refugees, while also producing economic subjectivities and proliferating neoliberal values. This participant ethnography was conducted at a regional headquarters of one of the world’s largest international refugee resettlement agencies, producing a range of texts for critical rhetorical analysis. Drawing on theories of postcolonialism, this study investigates the ways that refugee empowerment rhetoric articulates with neoliberal tropes of self-sufficiency and the American Dream, complicates and struggles against dominant representations of normative resettlement, and illustrates rhetorical dimensions of agency and self-representation. By examining the implications of empowerment discourse and practices, humanitarian organizations can begin to conceptualize resettlement in a way that avoids excluding difference. © 2018 Southern States Communication Association.

Neoliberalism empowerment Refugees Critical rhetoric

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