Actualizing State of Exceptions: Humanitarian Education and Syrian Refugee Children With Disabilities in Lebanon

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Exploring Disability Representation Through an Intersectional Lens (Table 19)

Abstract

Despite the latest efforts in promoting a more inclusive framework within humanitarian education, refugee children with disabilities, especially severe, and complex disabilities, remain largely overlooked and neglected in emergency contexts (Ronoh et al., 2015; Crea et al., 2022). Drawing on a Critical Disability Theory (CDT) lens, this work explores the ontological assumptions that justify the systematic exclusion of disabled Syrian refugee children in Lebanon. The paper argues that rhetoric of inclusion deployed by humanitarian agencies is constitutive of this condition of exclusion. Being based on a neoliberal and colonial ideology, the humanitarian conceptualization of inclusion contributes to the construction of disabled Syrian refugee children as Homo Sacer (Agamben, 1998).

Author

• Giada Costantini, University of Birmingham