Countering Ugliness in the Resettlement Process: Refugee Girls' Struggle for Rightful Presence Through STEM-Rich Making

• In Event: Race, Gender, Dis/Ability, and the Intersection of Core Curriculums

Abstract

We draw on the framework of Rightful Presence and Atmospheric walls to investigate how teenage refugee girls leveraged STEM-rich making to name and push back on oppressive forces operating in their resettlement spaces. Drawing on 1.5 years of ethnographic data at a weekly, STEM-rich making club held at a refugee community center, we explore how, through engaging in STEM-rich making, refugee youth leveraged on their making context and emerging making expertise to seek for a rightful presence in their resettlement spaces, through the creation of artifacts necessary for living a better life, to efforts in reshaping the climate of their resettlement space to be more uplifting, in resistance to being positioned as the perpetual, less than “other”.

Authors

• Edna Tan, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

• Beverly S. Faircloth, University of North Carolina - Greensboro