Who gets to belong, and who gets to be seen? Rethinking gendered engagement in research with forcibly displaced lone parents

“This project is for lone parents, right?” a colleague asks me after a presentation. “Are there any men involved in your study?”. 

I’ve been asked this more than once since beginning my PhD research with forcibly displaced lone parents living in Scotland. The workshops I’ve been running, centred around collage-making and storytelling, were open to any person with experience of lone parenthood and forced displacement. But for a long time, every person who took part was a woman. More specifically, a mother. 

This wasn’t by design, nor was it the topic I set out to study. My research focuses on the intersection of identity, social connectedness, and mental health and wellbeing for forcibly displaced lone parents. And while the design of the project, including the research questions and the methods, was co-developed in close collaboration with a group of experts with lived experience, all of those involved in this group were also mothers. Their insight, priorities, and perspectives have shaped the direction of the work in powerful and necessary ways, but this also means that gender was quietly embedded in the project from the outset, even before it was made explicit. 

As is often the case with participatory and arts-informed research, who shows up, and why, can shift the terrain entirely. So now, I’m asking a new set of questions. What does it mean when only women come to a project designed for lone parents? How do gendered expectations, roles, and structural exclusions shape people’s lives, as well as their ability to participate in research and be seen by research? 

Re-examining the category of ‘lone parent’ 

Before we can make sense of who engages and who doesn’t, it’s worth pausing to ask what we mean by ‘lone parent’ in the first place. Although the term is often used as if it refers to a single, knowable group, research suggests that lone parenthood is far from uniform. Parents move in and out of partnered relationships. They may live apart due to conflict, bereavement, or migration. They may be the sole caregiver for a time, or part of a wider caregiving network across households or borders (Nieuwenhuis and Maldonado 2018; Treanor 2020). Yet in many service and policy contexts, ‘lone parent’ remains quietly synonymous with ‘single mother’. This assumed equivalence has real consequences. It can shape who sees themselves reflected in a project’s invitation, who feels the offer is for them, and who has the practical or emotional resources to say yes. Lone fathers, for instance, are rarely the target of family support programmes and may feel either invisible or pathologised when they are. Meanwhile, lone mothers often occupy one of the most stigmatised and disadvantaged social positions in the UK, facing economic hardship, public scrutiny, and structural barriers to support (Treanor, 2020; Tyler 2008). That visibility, however, does not guarantee care. More often, it invites surveillance and blame. 

Locating gender in the frame 

Although my project was not originally framed through a gender lens, it’s impossible to ignore how gender permeates every part of the research encounter: from who takes part, to how people speak about parenting, care, and community. 

When I say ‘gender’, I’m not only referring to identity, but to the social roles, norms, and institutions that shape what is expected of people based on how they’re perceived. In this project, gender surfaces through emotional labour, protective parenting strategies, and people’s reflections on how they’re seen by housing officers, caseworkers, teachers, and neighbours. It also surfaces in more structural ways — through who has access to childcare, who gets targeted for support services, and who is perceived as a ‘vulnerable’ resettlement case.  

Many of the forcibly displaced lone parents who resettle in the UK are women. This is not coincidental. Women travelling with children are often prioritised in asylum and resettlement processes, particularly where gender-based violence, conflict-related sexual violence, or family separation have been part of their migration experience (Freedman 2016; UNHCR 2011). At the same time, systemic barriers mean that their partners may remain behind due to immigration restrictions, financial limitations, or legal complications around family reunification (Beaton et al. 2018). In effect, these women are constructed both as vulnerable and as caregivers - a framing that shapes their routes to safety, as well as how they are treated within the welfare system. The logistics of parenting alone are never just personal. They are entangled with policies on family reunion, welfare conditionality, and housing precarity. 

Rethinking absence, visibility, and participation 

So why should we care? Because when services, research, or policies treat ‘lone parent’ as a neutral, de-gendered category, we risk reproducing the invisibility of those most affected. We miss how care work is gendered, how bureaucracy is gendered, and how engagement, whether in civic life or in research, is made easier or harder based on gendered roles and assumptions. 

As I move into the next stages of my research, I’m thinking about how to better account for these absences, not as gaps to be filled but as forms of exclusion that tell us something important. This isn’t a call to re-centre men in work on parenting, but to attend to the ways gender is structuring participation, silence and visibility, often without being named. We need to stop imagining lone parenting as a flat or neutral category and see how it is shaped by social roles, structural inequalities, and the weight of care - particularly in the context of forced displacement. 

References: 

Beaton, E., Musgrave, A., and Liebl, J. (2018). Safe but not settled: The impact of family separation on refugees in the UK. [Report]. Accessible: https://www.refugeecouncil.org.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2019/03/Safe_but_not_settled.pdf  

Freedman, J. (2016). Sexual and gender-based violence against refugee women: A hidden aspect of the refugee 'crisis'. Reproductive Health Matters, 24(47), 18–26. 

Nieuwenhuis, R., and Maldonado, L. C. (2018). The triple bind of single-parent families: Resources, employment and policies to improve wellbeing. Policy Press.  

Treanor, M. C. (2020). Child Poverty: Aspiring to Survive. Policy Press.  

Tyler, I. (2008). “Chav Mum Chav Scum”: Class disgust in contemporary Britain. Feminist Media Studies, 8(1), 17–34.  

UNHCR (2011). Resettlement Handbook. Geneva: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. 

Author Bio

Bryony Nisbet is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, researching how identity, social connectedness, and mental health and wellbeing intersect in the lives of forcibly displaced lone parents in Scotland.