Persons Concern: Unforgetting Coloniality and Imagining Futures in Refugee Education

• In Event: The Power Of (Un)Forgetting, Historical Consciousness And Decolonial Future Of Education

Abstract

This paper examines the performativity of the “Person of Concern”— category through which refugees are governed. While humanitarian policies frame refugee education as progressive tool for inclusion, this study argues these frameworks reproduce colonial power structures. Drawing on Quijano’s coloniality of power and Butler’s theory of performativity, this research analyzes dialectic between institutional discourse and refugee lived experience. Using critical discourse analysis of UNHCR policy and constructivist grounded theory analysis of participatory workshops with Syrian and Iraqi refugees in Türkiye, this paper demonstrates that “Person of Concern” is not a stable identity but a performative status activated at institutional boundaries. This work contributes to “unforgetting” the colonial histories of humanitarian governance and “imagining futures” for refugee education rooted in epistemic justice.

Author

• Adnan Turan, Arizona State University