Biopolitics, Debilitation, and Neoliberal Post-Colonialism: Humanism versus Educational Rights for Ukrainian Refugee Children in Ireland

• In Event: Bordering Difference and Reimagining Inclusive Futures: Global Struggles Toward Intersectional Justice

Abstract

Objectives
We disrupt traditional notions of education for refugee children as a humanitarian social service and instead position the education of displaced children as a necessary response to biopolitical debility (Puar, 2017). We hold Irish school professionals as experts on the tension and disjuncture between a personal, ethical commitment to providing just opportunities for displaced students and cultural d/Discourses (Gee, 1999) and narratives around resource distribution constraints between Irish citizens and non-Irish people in Ireland.

Theoretical Framework
Accepting more refugees per capita than any other Western European nation, we employ Jasbir Puar’s framework for disability as assemblages of disablement and debility within the context of kinetic and biopolitical warfare to examine how Irish schools have responded to Ukrainian refugee children in the wake of Russia’s 2022 attack on Ukraine.

Methods
We used Critical Discourse Analysis to surface cultural cognitive structures (D’Andrade, 2005) field notes, key interactions, public documents, and recorded interviews taken over four total weeks in Ireland in October 2024 and March 2025.

Data Sources
Data for this research includes: school visits (key interactions, field notes), official state law and policy, public documents, and interviews with teachers, school personnel, and state educational support service providers.

Results
We argue that the role special education plays in broad, public discourses and in the private speech of school actors embodies the tension between a personal commitment to humanitarian service for displaced children in schools and a material competition for resources, hinging on a person’s perceived contributions to society. Complicating growing anti-immigrant sentiment in pop culture, Ireland remains a nation-state that has been historically shaped by colonial trauma– including forced famine and mass emigration. Thus, we found that underlying the tensions between support for displaced people and nationalism, Ireland, as a member of the European Union, has also adopted a racialized-white, Western identity. This constructs an ideological border with the Global South that compels Ireland into white hegemony (Allen, 2001) and racializes a Celtic identity: an identity that was once depicted by British colonialism as “savage.” We found that this racialized construction maintains material, symbolic, and ideological borders through official policies on immigration and refugee status that distribute resources– including education– and opportunities to both work and be educated based on perceived ability, intelligence, and citizenship contribution.

Scholarly significance
By situating Ireland as a white, Western European nation with a post-colonial and anti-colonial spirit, we highlight the necessity of examining schools as sites of further colonization even in an effort to increase chances of success–if not survival–for refugee children by emphasizing the role of debilitation (Puar, 2017) in biopolitics and global warfare in granting or denying the potential for the benefits of education.

Author

• Nickie Coomer, Colorado College