Refugee Critical Race Theory in Education: An Emerging Ontological and Epistemological Lens

• In Event: Legally Statused Realities in the Racialized World: Educational Implications for Refugee Children

Abstract

The purpose of this theoretical paper is to delineate the central tenets of an emerging theory: Refugee critical race theory (RefugeeCrit). In light of the world wrenching refugee displacement (UNHCR, 2015) there is a growing need to understand the complex experiences of refugee children and the structures that produce and undermine refugees’ post-displacement lives and education. A powerful theoretical framework exists to create educational praxis (Yamamoto, 1997) for students of Color including Latinx (Solorzano & Yosso, 2001), African Americans (Howard, 2008), Asian Americans (Teranishi, 2002), Indigenous and Tribal peoples (Brayboy, 2005), and immigrants (Wing, 2002). Yet, a specialized theoretical framework is necessary to study the educational experiences of young refugees. Thus, we propose a framework rooted in critical race theory, RefugeeCrit. Grounded in research using critical race theory (Bell, 1987; Delgado & Stefancic, 2001) to frame school-based studies in early childhood (Cheruvu, Souto-Manning, Lencl, & Chin-Calubaquib, 2015; Strekalova, 2013), RefugeeCrit refocuses critical race theory on the educational implications of refugees’ legally sanctioned, economically chained, and racialized/minorotized realities.
The key principal of a critical race theory in education is to foreground stories of oppressed peoples, analyzing how racism infiltrates instructional, curricular, and assessment practices, and critiquing neo-liberal policies and practices in schools (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). Similarly, RefugeeCrit foregrounds counter-storytelling as a methodology that brings forward what refugee children are experiencing and what else they could. RefugeeCrit analyses the intersection of international and local law, politics, economics, psychology, and education to understand the “why” behind the refugee displacement and ongoing educational and otherwise injustices upon their resettlement. RefugeeCrit theorizes refugees as raced, minoritized (McCarty, 2002) and legally statused beings that have been systematically oppressed by structures of power within their own countries of origin and after resettlement.
Present in research (McBrien, 2005), children’s literature (Strekalova-Hughes & Wang, 2017), and public discourse (Kisiara, 2015), “the image of the suffering, helpless, and needy refugee” has become a “fixture in refugee representation” (p. 163). Tuck (2009) warns communities, teachers, and researchers against subscribing to “damage centred” research that documents “peoples’ pain and brokenness” and “reinforces and reinscribes a one-dimensional notion of these people as depleted, ruined, and hopeless” (p. 409). Refugee storytelling as a methodology needs to consider positionality of those asking and listening to refugee stories. We need to critically consider positionality of the audience (race, citizenship status, SES) and how these convoluting factors may (un)intentionally perpetuate the oppression of the statused and racialized storytellers, producing “on demand” stories of trauma, violence, damage, and neediness.
Refugee narratives are often legally and economically chained to their protective status. Refugee stories need careful unpacking to remove the “damage centred” layers created to fit into the legal and material access mechanisms. RefugeeCrit invites educational researches to untangles stories of refugees that, left unstudied, could function as self-fulfilling mechanisms of oppression.
The ultimate goal of RefugeeCrit is to find the ways how to disturb the underlying mechanisms of oppression through transformation of educational policies and praxis for refugee children.

Authors

• Ekaterina Strekalova-Hughes, University of Missouri - Kansas City

• Kindel Turner Nash, The University of Missouri-Kansas City

• Ersoy Erdemir, Bogazici University