Stitching the tears: refugee youth refusing racialized schooling in Croatia

• In Event: Education Reform, Activism and Social Change

Proposal

In this paper I tell the stories of refugee youth from South West Asia and North Africa who have lived and been schooled in Croatia ever since the long summer of migration of 2015 (Kasparek & Speer, 2015). During the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, I – as an activist-scholar and a former refugee from the wars in the Balkans – had documented personal narratives of seven refugees that unpack the longevities of social distancing imposed by the grammar of multiple pandemics (ITSRC, 2020) and securitized migration regimes against racialized and gendered Others (Bužinkić & Hameršak, 2017; Kurnik & Beznec, 2018). During the second year of the Covid-19 pandemic, after the two devastating earthquakes in central Croatia that refugee youth and myself experienced, I organized a collaborative autoethnography and collective memory writing sessions (Haug, 1999; Nagar, 2006), that centered memory writing and storytelling about refugee youth’s perpetual displacements, both literal and metaphorical.

Refugee youth’s experiences of displacement accounted for the exile from their home (countries) as well as for the Islamophobic, racialized, and gendered politics deployed through disciplining and other punitive measures synchronized between schooling regimes and securitized migration and border control regimes in Croatia, and elsewhere in European Union. In these documented narratives I show that young refugees experience everyday oppression formed on the intersectional axis of race, class, gender, religion, and cultural identities (Collins-Hill, 2019). Such experiences inevitably invite the grappling with one’s own identity, as well as the effects and affects of social constructs informing the pervasive political projects of multiple pandemics. Those experiences also shape different forms of vulnerabilities of refugee youth which often re-traumatize them; however, as my research shows, they represent an even stronger source of their resistance and defiance (Nagar, 2018; Rasza, 2020), both through everyday small acts and visible mass protests.

In this paper I discuss how refugee youth unpack systems of power and pursue struggles for epistemic justice accounting for personal empowerment, local organizing, and transnational solidarities. I bring examples of refugee youth’s refusals of racialization in the language classrooms, and at the pedagogues office, as well as the protests for liberation of Palestinian, Iranian and Syrian peoples on the larger political scale. Through my personal and refugee youth tale telling I discuss refugee youth’s hopes and acts of imagination that defy rigors of border regimes and politics of miseration (Shakhsari, 2020) in education and larger society. I end my discussion by showing how the research methodologies of collective memory writing and collaborative autoethnography empowered refugee youth’s voice and visibilized their struggles (Stojić-Mitrović, 2022). I also show the emergence of collective identity and transnational solidarities shaping the refugee youth movement in Croatia (Bužinkić & Schick, 2023).

My intention is to theorize, in this paper, about the complexities of refugee youth protests and refugee youth agency as a response to the question: How do we represent the complexities of protest?

Author

• Emina Buzinkic, Institute for Development and International Relations (IRMO)