4. Newcomer Immigrant and Refugee Youths’ Life Stories and Civic Engagement

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

Proposal

Political discourse on immigration policy can provide a window into the boundaries society places on citizenship and civic engagement. While previous research has added to understandings of citizenship policies and practices in public and institutional spheres, little research has explored the stances of immigrant youth around them. This presentation will draw on the life stories of high school students in the U.S. who are from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to analyze the role of current political discourses on immigration in these students’ perspectives on their place within school and society. How do these youth position themselves and others within discourses that frame them as a threat to American ideals? How do these students conceptualize civic engagement and disengagement more broadly? The life stories to be explored are drawn from individual and focus group interviews, field notes from classroom observations, and recordings of peer interaction in high school civics classes collected during the 2016 presidential campaigns and in the months following the Trump election. Paradoxically, some youth aligned themselves with pubic anti-immigrant discourses toward those they perceived to be undocumented, while others pushed back against xenophobic discourses by situating their own identities within global race relations that stem from colonialism and its aftermath in Africa and the U.S. Findings complicate popular understandings of the role of schools in cultivating a certain kind of citizenship connected to a single national identity toward one that is borne out of personal histories that transcend geographic borders.

Author

• Liv Davila, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign