Uprisings, Migration and Education: Youth Biographies from Berlin

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday IV)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Migration and education: life stories in motion

Proposal

What happens when young, well-educated citizens with good prospects for higher education, careers and work in their home countries find themselves as reluctant refugees and migrants? What strategies do young people (18-35 years) pursue when they lose much of their education, social and cultural capital in new national, political and cultural environments? This paper is concerned disrupted educations and careers of young people in light of political upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa region, particularly in the aftermath of Iran’s Green Movement in 2009 and the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011. It considers the conditions under which young refugees and migrants arrived in Berlin and strategies they are pursuing to cope and survive in their new environments. From a methodological point of view, the paper makes a case for the value of biographical research at moments of historical rupture and political change. It explores how “education biographies,” a subcategory within the larger canon of biographical and life history research, can be one way to understand how recent refugees/migrants carry, build, and/or lose educational capital as they navigate their migration and find new pathways to build livelihoods. Finally, some finding from the biographies of five migrants in Berlin, Germany from Syria, Iran and Afghanistan will be shared to illuminate how the details of the lives of migrants, their choices, experiences, trajectories, can be valuable to informing policy debates and public opinion.

Author

• Linda Herrera, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign