From object to subject in Luxembourg: Refugees’ entrepreneurial journeys

How do we know what we know when those who have most to teach us are so often spoken for rather than heard? This dissertation begins in the pause the question creates. It takes seriously the proposition that knowledge is made with people, not about them, and that accountable research recognises interlocutors as co-authors, bringing methods, institutions, and evaluation into dialogue with those who live the phenomena under study. “From Object to Subject in Luxembourg: Refugees’ Entrepreneurial Journeys” gives this stance its form. Within that wider stance, the dissertation treats refugees as expert agents who compose futures amid constraint and moves the epistemic centre of refugee entrepreneurship scholarship and practice towards those who live it, narrate it, and enact it. In doing so, it revalues forms of knowing long kept at the margins and opens new possibilities for intercultural collaboration and genuine dialogue.
From object to subject, the work moves across two empirical fields. The first is a live milieu of scholarship, treated reflexively as an object of study that traces how ideas about refugee entrepreneurship are produced, authorised, and legitimated. The second is the lived milieu of entrepreneuring in Luxembourg, where stories, artefacts, and images carry analyses forward. This dual anchoring creates a dialogue between theory and life, positioning the study as both analytical and experiential. Luxembourg is an officially trilingual and functionally plurilingual welfare state with a high standard of living, and language expectations that colour everyday access to work, services, and civic life. Almost half the population is foreign-born, and for third-country nationals, diversity often appears as small, interwoven micro-communities rather than large enclaves, shaping how people find one another and support coalesces. Layered residence statuses and public provisions widen and narrow the pathways to training, finance, and community life, while the openness of borders and a light diplomatic footprint afforded participants a lived sense of safety in which to exhale and reorient. This landscape is integral to method as well as meaning. Within this setting, the dissertation proceeds through five interrelated phases, resonating with the cultural majority of the participants—Blue (Bayān, clarity and articulation), Green (Talab al-‘Ilm, growth and seeking knowledge), Yellow (Fahm, illumination and understanding), Purple (‘Aql, depth of reasoning), and White (Hikmah, wisdom and synthesis)—an architecture aligned with a phronetic epistemology that carries the study from foundations to synthesis while keeping analysis grounded in lived experience.
In the first phase of the dissertation, the Blue Phase (Bayān, representing clarity and articulation), the study sets its ground and compass. It clarifies key terms, such as refugee and asylum seeker, refugee entrepreneurship and entrepreneuring, and articulates the topography of refuge alongside a distinct research context. A phronetic stance is made explicit, together with an ethical commitment to subjecthood in representation and analysis. Positionality is deeply elaborated and introduced as a structuring thread: reflective and reflexive work, and a carefully considered insider-outsider location, are made visible and revisited throughout. The approach to the empirical work is specified with equal care across both fields. The scholarship of refugee entrepreneurship is treated as empirical material (with its own systematic review and reflexive reading), and the Luxembourg fieldwork proceeds through a layered, adaptive design that assembles biographical life histories, open thematic interviewing, and an artefact-mediated phenomenological component, preparing the terrain for collage work. Methodologically, this phase commits to privileging participants as authors of meaning; methods and analytic strategies follow their lead. The objectives are explicit and pursued throughout: to advance participant-led interpretation and to redistribute interpretive authority. From this ethic, all that follows proceeds. Identity collages, integrated with interviews and artefact-mediated dialogue, broaden what counts as evidence, widen participation across languages and cultural backgrounds, and anchor interpretation in participants’ horizons of meaning.
In the Green Phase (Talab al-‘Ilm, referring to growth and seeking knowledge), the study cultivates the live milieu of scholarship and delivers its first major contribution: the first systematic review of refugee entrepreneurship, offering an inaugural compositional mapping that both situates and unsettles what we think we know. Synthesising work up to 2018 (published in 2020), “From Center to Periphery and Back Again: A Systematic Literature Review of Refugee Entrepreneurship” brings the field into focus on its own ground while portraying a fast-emerging, eclectic domain produced largely in the academic centre, with scant cross-citation and limited dialogue among scholars. A combined bibliometric and content reading identifies three waves organised around countries of origin, countries of residence, and migration timeframes; a methodological tilt towards qualitative, exploratory designs; and a recurring subsumption of refugee entrepreneurship within broader migrant or ethnic frames. The review notes what is missing as well as what is present: muted geographies, under-recognised populations, thin engagement with refugee theory, limited attention to demand-side conditions, scarce longitudinal and comparative work, and a gender bias echoed from the wider entrepreneurship literature. It casts these absences as invitations to re-pose questions, widen contexts and build conversations that travel across arenas, and while doing so, this agenda-setting publication helped articulate refugee entrepreneurship as an analytically distinct field.
From this vantage, the dissertation delivers its second major contribution in the Yellow Phase (Fahm, pointing to illumination and understanding): a multilevel, multidirectional conceptual model for studying refugees’ entrepreneuring, published as a Routledge book chapter, “Refugee Entrepreneurship Dynamics: Conceptual Considerations for Research”. Drawing on capital theories, communities of practice, and cultural theory, it foregrounds the conditions of neoliberal logics and epistemic injustice that make a multidirectional stance necessary, and offers a way to trace how values, resources, and practices circulate and evolve between persons, networks, and institutions—and with what effects. It contends that unidirectional analyses and deficit framings, operating within neoliberal conditions that place the responsibility to “thrive” on refugees, yield partial understandings and entrench recognition inequities within existing knowledge hierarchies. In response, it offers an alternative analytical repertoire through a framework that recognises influence as interwoven rather than linear, reformulating power, legitimacy, and agency as relational and negotiated across domains. This is both a theoretical and an ethical shift. The refugee is treated not as object but as subject whose practice co-constitutes organisational and institutional conditions of action. Conceptually, the multidirectional model equips scholars to study entrepreneuring as movement across sites and scales. Analytically, it supports comparative designs, follows policy effects into everyday practice, and links micro practices with meso and macro arrangements without collapsing one into the other. Ethically, it holds explanation close to lived horizons of meaning and clarifies both the structure of relations and the location of voice. The aim is to make explicit what is often asserted yet under-theorised: refugee entrepreneurs are shaped by, and simultaneously shape, their environments through dynamic processes of co-construction, co-development, and co-culturation, so that research resists reproducing the very narratives it seeks to challenge.
In the Purple Phase (‘Aql, denoting depth of reasoning), the study reaches its empirical heart and advances a third major contribution: a participant-led, arts-based practice in which identity collages operate as acts of languaging in their lived milieu of Luxembourg. Six long-form cases of entrepreneuring refugees—Farid (Syria), Anastasia (Ukraine), Zahra (Iraq), Osaze (Nigeria), Asmahan (Syria), and Fahad (Tunisia)—were assembled through extended field-embedding (2017–2020) in an ethnographically inflected, layered design that included biographical life histories, open thematic interviews, a phenomenological interview with an artefact-mediated component, and collage-making followed by a dedicated phenomenological conversation on the collage. The inescapable subjectivity and complexity of identity formation, together with difficulties sourcing meaningful objects after material loss and prolonged temporariness, required methods to evolve in relation to person and context; a phronetic orientation enabled that responsiveness in both procedure and analysis. Collages function as artefacts of self-representation and interpretation through which participants work reflexively with meaning, re-language experience, and claim authorship of selfing narratives of becoming. A sustained consideration of interview languages and languaging through methods marks the epistemological shift, alongside selfing and entrepreneuring, towards participant-led methods and analytic attentiveness. The phase holds cross-case interpretation in reserve. It resists neocolonial conventions and locates interpretive authority with participants and their representations, keeping knowledge authored at its source.
The White Phase (Hikmah, signalling wisdom and synthesis) gathers the Purple (‘Aql), materials and articulates the dissertation’s fourth major contribution in the published journal article, “From Object to Subject: Journeys to the Metaphor-Informed Identity Through Identity Collages,” whereby through the participatory, arts-based practice, identity collages make metaphor-informed identities visible and bring values as orienting anchors to the fore. Here the synthesis is made explicit as an epistemology of selfing and languaging in journeys of becoming, whereby participants work reflexively with meaning-making, re-language experience, and claim authorship of selfing narratives of becoming. Crucially, this empirical work interrogates Western framings of identity and centres non-Western, communal, spiritual, and relational understandings articulated by participants themselves. Values such as peace, dignity, autonomy, creativity, and solidarity emerge as orienting anchors and foundational systems that guide direction and selfhood, entwining past, present, and future across contexts of forced displacement and resettlement. Together with life histories, thematic interviews, and artefact-mediated conversation, the collages extend the qualitative archive beyond interview primacy. They open registers of expression ordinary talk rarely reaches, reduce linguistic asymmetries and cultural othering, and provide a visual, metaphoric mode that travels across languages and cultures. Thus, art becomes a language of inquiry through which the ineffable (felt, embodied, tacit) can be communicated within participant-defined horizons of meaning. This stance is as much an ethical commitment as a methodological one. The cases also illuminate entrepreneuring as identity repair and repositioning, and they point to the promise of longitudinal collage work and its pedagogical and therapeutic reach, sustaining the dissertation’s principle of subjecthood—that knowledge begins where life is lived and voiced by those who live it.
This dissertation asks where knowledge lives, who is accorded epistemic standing, and how it is recognised when voiced from beyond dominant centres of scholarship. Across five phases and two empirical fields, it marks the passage from object to subject in method and meaning. Concepts arise from fieldwork and return to it; findings sit beside method as findings about method. The two-field framing treats scholarship as live milieu and Luxembourg as lived milieu, holding analysis in conversation with experience and keeping voice located with those who author it. Methodologically, the work offers a portable arts-based practice for identity work. Languaging and re-languaging are formalised as ways of knowing that sustain precision while allowing formulations to evolve toward what feels true to experience. Treating the research literature itself as empirical material enables reflexive designs that situate studies within the intellectual ecologies that shape them.
There are also implications for policy and practice. Approaches that cast entrepreneurship solely as labour-market insertion overlook the early drivers of engagement: identity repair, recognition, and relation. Programmes that build with, rather than for, align more closely with lived trajectories. Where meaning-making relies on multilingual languaging, monolingual pathways will not surface what matters most. When artefacts enable participants’ authorship, assessment is strengthened by forms of evidence co-defined with them.
Across its phases, the dissertation renders the field visible through a systematic review, equips it with a multidirectional model, extends method through participatory, arts-based practice, and articulates an epistemology of selfing and languaging in becoming. To learn from, rather than merely about, those who carry the name “refugee” is to accept that research itself must become relational, careful, and humane. The value of the work lies in its conjunction of conceptual clarity, methodological invention, and fidelity to lived experience, and in the call it issues for scholarship that is rigorous in analysis, generous in encounter, and oriented toward the worlds it seeks to understand. It closes at the place it opened—a pause in which object and subject keep moving, and the next questions are carried forward with those who live them.