Abstract:
Extensive work has been carried out on gender and social transformation but there is a need
for more work between these intersecting trajectories and their implications for Christian
mission. Drawing on data collected from one of the migrants this current study employs the
postcolonial lens to analyse interview responses on a migration experience of a young female
migrant in South Africa and highlights survival strategies for young migrants by demonstrating
that the impact of changing global socio-economic landscapes and poverty on migrant
communities presents opportunity to explore alternative missional paradigms and theologies
that address conditions of deprivation. As a contribution to United Nations (UN) Sustainable
Development Goals, this study also highlights how some migrant women use situations of
deprivation to promote socio-economic transformation through radical doctrines of resistance.
Interrogating key themes that emerged from the interview (2) alongside Dolores William’s
doctrines of resistance demonstrates how one adolescent migrant embodies the radical
doctrine of hope as lived reality expressed through a resilient theology of survival, which is
sustained by developing and adapting to new lifestyles through cultural capital, skills,
competency, new personal qualities, fashion and language or accents as means for survival
strategies in the face of hostility.
CONTRIBUTION : By reflecting on the complex and gendered survival strategies for migrant
women in religious communities, this article represents a systematic and practical reflection
within a paradigm in which the intersection of Philosophy, Religious Studies, Social Sciences,
Humanities and Natural Sciences generates an interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and trans
disciplinary contested discourse.
