"She Was Nice but I Saw the Look on Her Face": Engaging the "Between" Spaces of Work With Refugee Students and Families

• In Event: Toward a Humanizing and Equitable Discourse With Refugee Newcomers: Resisting the Double Standard

Abstract

This paper bridges critical refugee studies concepts with the literature on refugee education, aiming to examine and advance the possibilities of humanizing educational discourses and practices aimed at supporting refugee youth and families. In our work, we have encountered their concern about the status and label of ‘refugee’ and its impact on their ability to participate in the receiving context. Their concern raises questions about when and how one might move beyond the status of refugee into one of member with a sense of belonging, participation, and a dignity-conferring sense of being fully valued. It also raises questions of what it might mean to not only live in that “between” space, but to work with these youth and families as educators in those spaces.
In political contexts dominated by the use of fear towards exclusionary aims, migration scholars have argued for the importance of a rehumainzation process that begins with a re-framing of the narratives by political and institutional leaders (Esses, Medianu & Sutter, 2021). At the same time, critical refugee studies scholars raise questions about the very notion of humanness in our studies with refugees, promoting migration scholars “to seriously reckon with our own fragmented humanness, including the differential positions we inhabit within intersecting global orders of race, class, gender, ability, and geographical location” (Brankamp & Weima, 2021, p. 5). Working with dominant labels and categories can “limit our understanding of migration and make us potentially complicit in a political process which has, over recent years, stigmatised, vilified and undermined the rights of refugees and migrants.” (Crawley and Skleparis, 2018). Since education, both as a formative experience and as a social institution is a central location of intervention in the lives of newcomers who are refugees, these critical examinations of language and policy invite educators to consider the implications they have for refugee families and youth and for their ability to define the parameters of their belonging and participation.
Through both theoretical considerations and their application to case study examples, we elaborate on how educators and education researchers are invited to walk the razor’s edge between seemingly competing situations, dealing with amorphous policy categories and having to make complex decisions for the well-being of refugee youth and their families. Educators, too, need to inhabit the intentional, “between” spaces where individuals are recognized in their humanity and unique needs, but where the structural examinations of power and the unequal positioning of newcomers is not overlooked and where relational empathy and compassion do not elide political responses to dehumanization (Darling, 2021). We examine how educators’ and schools’ work needs to takes place between recognizing the refugee status and its implications and not reducing the person to that identity category; between supporting the refugee student in their needs, and yet not trapping the youth in that category indefinitely by inadvertently disallowing self-definition; between rejecting derogatory labels for refugees as ‘resource-takers’ and yet resisting the commodification of these youth as “resources” themselves.

Authors

• Ramona M. Fruja, Bucknell University
  Presenting Author

• Kevin C. Roxas, Western Washington University
  Presenting Author