"Nobody Knows About Us": Contesting Refugee Erasure in Community-Based Educational Spaces

• In Event: Building Educational Possibilities: Migrants, Refugees, and Students of Color

Abstract

"Nobody knows about us," was the common refrain lamented by the Southeast Asian high school youth in this study. Many wanted others to know that resettlement is the beginning of a refugee's story in the receiving nation. For school-aged students, the resettlement process largely takes place in schools. Much of the educational literature on Southeast Asian students has primarily been school-centered and reveal a bleak picture of endemic erasure and racialized inequity at the interpersonal, school-wide and policy level (Chhuon, 2014; Lee, S.J., 2005; Lee, S.J., 2022; Ngo, 2010; Ngo & Lee, 2007). In this paper, I shift the site of research out of schools to better understand how different modes of erasure within and beyond schools render Southeast Asian refugees' invisible. By revealing modes of erasure, I argue that community-based educational spaces not only provide young people with social and emotional support, but also the tools to contest the forces responsible for their erasure and historical and ongoing displacement.

Author

• Linda M. Pheng, University of Pennsylvania