Ordinary Solidarities in Refugee Education Response

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Rethinking Education in Emergencies: Critical Reflections on the Sector

Proposal

Growing attention to longstanding issues linked to racism and coloniality in humanitarian assistance has impelled important conversations about power inequities in refugee education and related scholarly fields. Critics assert that inequitable relationships in rights-based interventions reflect colonial inheritances, structural dynamics, and deficit views about local actors and refugee communities, who are commonly portrayed as lacking capacity, agency, credibility, relevant skills, and knowledge. Furthermore, critics cite “saviorism” as a pervasive orientation, reproduced through paternalistic relationships that cast local and refugee actors as objects of rescue. Both academic and practitioner-based literatures indicate that aid interventions reinscribe the epistemic authority of Northern “experts,” while undermining local knowledges, and they further describe the racialization of this expertise.
This paper contributes to these conversations within both practitioner and scholarly fields by advancing an anticolonial discursive framework (Sefa Dei & Asgharzadeh, 2001) for rights-based interventions in and through education. Drawing on a three-year case study of one faith-based school in Lebanon (2018-2021), this paper explores how one ordinary school in a refugee hostile transit country secured and protected the right to education for refugee children from Syria, within a significant broader context of multiple compounding crises. Data was collected through interviews, site visits, participant observation, and document analysis as part of a larger inquiry that sought to examine the nature and impact of partnerships in education in emergencies.
I use the notion of “ordinary solidarities” to describe how this refugee education response sustained engagement in learning, despite tremendous community opposition and against a deteriorating sociopolitical, economic, and pandemic backdrop. I argue that, through organic responsiveness, upholding of equitable relationships, and the principles of inclusion and anti-discrimination, ordinary solidarity embodies an anticolonial mandate for rights-based interventions and demands a shift in orientation from saviorism to care.
By exploring what might be learned by centering a localized refugee response, the study contributes to research on Southern responses to displacement. At the same time, it responds to the provocation to “combine discussions about what is possible with what exists” (Sefa Dei & Asgharzadeh, 2001, p. 298). By intertwining humanitarian discourse and one school’s practices, the paper draws out implications for ongoing efforts to reconfigure humanitarian relations and structures.
Sefa Dei, G. J., & Asgharzadeh, A. (2001). The power of social theory: The anti-colonial discursive framework. Journal of Educational Thought, 35(3), 297-323.

Author

• Zeena Zakharia, University of Maryland College Park