“Lees ua HMoob”: Stateless Approach to Educational Research With Displaced Youth

• In Event: Refusing Racial Injustice: Generating Educational Possibilities Through HMoob Theory and Praxis

Abstract

Objectives: Schooling for stateless people often operate from a nation-state-centric framework, where an individual’s access to education is through legal citizenship tied to a nation-state. Human rights organizations have employed such frameworks to advocate for educational resources for students without legal citizenship, but this advocacy does not fully offer equitable education for perpetually displaced groups. I utilize HMoob as a distinct case study for understanding statelessness as a historical reality where minoritized youth forge spaces of belonging that disrupt nation-state-centric notions of belonging.

Theoretical Framework: This study draws on the fields of Critical Refugee Studies and the anthropology of citizenship to contextualize a stateless approach to teaching and learning. Statelessness is a historical reality where the HMoob are rendered ahistorical and nongeographical (Vang, 2021). Education is a site of struggle where marginalized communities practice insurgent citizenship, one that destabilizes the hierarchy, to contest exclusionary practices of citizenship education (Holston, 1999). In tracing the everyday practices of insurgent citizenship, this paper articulates a stateless form of citizenship that departs from resistance to consider fugitive ways of home-making. Centering the HMoob historical reality of statelessness, I explore the hidden pedagogies that stateless people draw on to teach and learn about themselves.
Methods and Data: Employing feminist decolonial methodology (Fitzpatrick, 2013; Gailey, 2015; hooks, 1990; Tuhiwai Smith, 2012), this paper derives from a 12-month critical ethnography (March 2019-February 2020) that follows students, parents, community leaders, and educators in a predominately HMoob sub-district in northern Thailand. This study on HMoob in Thailand offers HMoob epistemologies as an entry point to reimagine equitable educational practices. This paper draws from the main data sources: (a) participant observations, (b) semi-structured interviews, and (c) document analysis.

Results: Findings demonstrate that HMoob, as a stateless community, has utilized both formal and informal education as fugitive spaces to survive and thrive against political persecution, forced migration, and war. HMoob people have been on the run from various imperial and colonial nation-states (Vang, 2021). In negotiating their ambivalent relationship with these nation-states and imperial states, the HMoob practice insurgent citizenship through silenced and secret ways of educating future generations about home-making. HMoob people have cultivated educational spaces to teach future generations about a HMoob worldview that centers communal and ethical relationships with the land. Specifically, their educational approach stems from their condition as stateless people that transcend nation-state-centric ideologies of how the world is organized.
Significance: Scholarship on educational practices from a stateless perspective challenge dominant ideologies that centers nation-state as the pillar of access to human services and resources such as education. In imagining racially-just education, scholars can benefit from studying alternative educational ideologies from stateless communities. Focusing on fugitivity, stateless approaches to educational research expose social hierarchies and power relations encountered by stateless people. Studying education from stateless perspectives provides nuance to understanding marginalized communities' collective insurgency in secret and silenced spaces.

Author

• Choua P. Xiong, University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh