Firing the imagination: Syrian refugee youths’ pathways to their imagined & plausible futures

• In Event: Navigating an unknowable future: language of instruction, teacher obligations, and aspirations of refugee youth pursuing education within national education settings

Proposal

The need to belong is a fundamental human need. However, conflict and forced displacement severely undermine belonging. As youth come of age, they seek safety, stability and social connection. However these markers are severely called under question in the case of refugee youth. Refugees find themselves caught in the “gaps between nation-states” (Haddad, 2008, p. 7). Unwanted by their host countries, unable to return to their countries of origin, and uncertain if and when resettlement to a third country will ever realize, they confront an “unknowable future” (Dryden-Peterson, 2017). In the absence of a nation-state-based anchor, three questions guide this investigation: 1) Which are the local and transnational communities where refugee youth are able to foster belonging and imagine any durable future? 2) What futures do refugee youth imagine for themselves and what, according to them, are the pathways that enable these futures? 3) How do refugee youth leverage their education opportunities to construct and shape these pathways?

This study begins to shed light on some of these questions. This study is based on 48, in-depth and semi-structured, repeat interviews with 15 Syrian, young adults (18-30 years) while they were pursuing their higher education in Lebanon. These data were collected in two phases in 2016: Phase 1 – January – July 2016; Phase II – December 2016. Data were analyzed using emic and etic codes within Atlas.ti. To frame my results, I draw on Appadurai’s (2013) framework on the future as a cultural fact, as an intersection of three human preoccupations of imagination, anticipation, and aspiration (p. 286). I argue that by virtue of its structure, design and delivery, refugee education stokes anticipation and optimism about the future. However, it does little to acknowledge or address refugee learners’ imaginings of their futures, or support the very realization of their aspirations. I find that refugee youth construct and distinguish their futures as those that are imagined or those that are plausible. Imagined futures are those ideas or concepts that young Syrians held in their long-run imaginings, but had not taken concrete steps in the present, toward realizing those futures. Plausible futures, on the other hand, are futures young Syrians viewed as realistic, short-term, manageable and malleable; futures for which they had taken concrete, even if small steps toward realizing. In the implications of this work, I discuss the ways the design and delivery of refugee education might usefully take into account refugee youths’ non-linear, myriad pathways to their imagined and plausible futures.

Author

• Vidur Chopra, Harvard University