“Exclusions of France’s Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité: Refugee and Migrant Youth Storytelling with Participatory Visual Methodologies”

• In Event: Transnational Migration, Refugees, and Education: Case Studies from Across the Globe

Proposal

In 2015 alone, over 1 million migrants and refugees, primarily from the Middle East and Africa, sought refuge in European countries. The drivers of this migration have been manifold and complex, but ongoing violence in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, along with economic hardships and insecurity across the African continent, have been major contributors to the migration surge. Since 2015, the number of migrants seeking refuge in Europe has dramatically decreased, as countries of the European Union implemented stricter security measures and established bilateral agreements to control the flow of migration from countries serving as popular staging points, such as Turkey and Libya. Though European countries like Greece and Italy are first points of contact for migrants with the European Union—and under EU law, migrants are obligated to register in countries of initial arrival—many migrants seek out opportunities in wealthier “destination” countries, such as France, Germany, and the UK. For migrant and refugee youth in the EU, schools represent not only a central point of encounter with institutions of the state in their host countries, but also sites where they are set in difference through explicit attempts to “integrate” them into liberal democracy, if not “modernity” itself (Jaffe-Walter, 2016). These encounters are becoming all the more fraught, given the growth of right wing populism and xenophobic and Islamophobic sentiment across many European Union states. France in particular espouses a universalist nationalist ideology in which the expression of ethnic, racial, or religious difference is seen as a social affront, if not a political threat (Limage, 2000).

Against this backdrop, this presentation considers the following questions: in response to dominant representations of the “threat” of migration and the incessant insistence to be grateful for the hospitality of their French hosts, how do migrant and refugee youth counter-narrate their experiences and afterlives of arrival in their new schools and communities? If given the opportunity to intervene in the narration of their lives, what stories would they offer?

With these questions in mind, this presentation explores methodological implications and initial findings from an ongoing digital storytelling project with migrant and refugee secondary students in the southern suburbs of Paris. Informed in part from critical youth participatory action research approaches (Cammarota and Fine, 2008) and Tobin et. al’s (2009) video-cued multi-vocal ethnographic approach, the researcher is working closely with 10 migrant and refugee youth to co-produce knowledge about their lived conditions and how those conditions contour their educational experiences in the form of short films. Such an approach is significant for two reasons: first, centering refugee and migrant youth-produced narratives carry the potential to disrupt existing knowledge hierarchies that sustain and justify unequitable social and educational arrangements in France; second, a visual participatory approach enables immigrant and refugee youth to work as active knowledge-makers rather than as passive objects of research.

Author

• Roozbeh Shirazi, University of Minnesota