Borderless Higher Education and the Politics of Knowledge Production

• In Event: Migrant's and refugees' experience of higher education and the labor market

Proposal

This paper explores the significance of, and possibilities for, hybrid graduate education in a refugee camp. It does so through empirical study of the lived experiences of the first Masters degree recipients in Kenya’s Dadaab Refugee camps, a thirty year old settlement located 78 kilometers from the Somali border. Globally, only 5 percent of refugees access higher education (UNHCR, 2021). Graduate study is even less accessible. As a result, 90 percent of research on refugees, who live primarily in the global South, originates in the global North (McNally & Rahim, 2020). To mitigate this representational gap, and in response to student requests, the Borderless Higher Education for Refugees (BHER) project launched the world’s only blended online- and camp-based graduate degree granting program in 2018 (CLCC, 2020). BHER is a consortium of Canadian and Kenyan universities and NGOs, based at York University in Toronto, that work to expand access to higher education for refugees in situ. By April 2022, twenty eight refugee scholars received a York University Masters of Education (MEd) degree entirely from Dadaab.

Our two-year research project, from which this paper is drawn, explores: (1) how the first BHER MEd cohorts experienced hybrid, graduate schooling and the opportunities and constraints of post graduate life; and considers (2) if and how graduate education can shift the politics of knowledge production in refugee studies and support the localization of leadership in service of regional justice, peace and sustainability. While emerging scholarship explores connected undergraduate programming in displacement, with particular focus on issues of access, financing, recognized credentials, etc. (Streitweiser et al, 2019), little is known about refugee experiences in graduate schooling. Empirical studies that do exist primarily focus on contexts of resettlement (e.g., Olsson et al., 2023), rather than those who remain in camps. Yet these student scholars hold significant insight as local knowledge producers and offer unique perspectives from which to interrogate power relations in research and humanitarianism.

In our analysis, we take inspiration from anthropological and other studies of refugee temporalities that offer nuanced understandings of the purposes for schooling amidst protracted displacement (e.g., Dryden-Peterson, 2017; Massa, 2023; Poole and Riggans, 2020). In relation to the politics of knowledge production, we draw insight from Cultural Studies and from critical race scholars who demonstrate that efforts to represent the forcibly displaced, or to intervene, are inherently racialized, even as race has largely been ignored in studies of humanitarian and development initiatives (Pailey, 2019; Pierre, 2019). By centering race and culture, we work to nuance analysis of the ‘local’ in critical development studies, where a North/South binary is often assumed (Roepstorff, 2020). We also explore the potential, limitations, and paradox of a Canadian university effort to decolonize knowledge production using digital technologies.

The research team, composed of the PI, two BHER MEd alumni collaborators, and two Canada-based students, conducted in-depth, semi-structured in-person or online interviews with 22 master’s degree recipients currently residing in Kenya, Somalia, or Ethiopia. Concurrently we engaged in collaborative autoethnography (Chang, 2021) to critically reflect on the research process itself and consider how power dynamics in research on refugees can be reimagined and transformed. All data was transcribed, translated, if necessary, and uploaded to AtlasTI. We conducted a weeklong, in-person coding and data analysis workshop, which involved reading content and adding preliminary codes derived from existing literature (deductive) and emerging from the data itself (inductive). We wrote individual analytic memos (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 2011) and recorded group discussion.

While data analysis is ongoing, our preliminary arguments focus on how access to graduate level education and research training, specifically, shapes participants’ senses of self, whether through what some described as new interpersonal skills; perceived social status; or roles as community leaders. Graduate level education facilitated membership in a global, digital scholarly community, made concrete through travel to international research forums, but also evidenced in the development of transnational research partnerships.

At the same time, graduate educational access reshaped alumni’s livelihoods and physical trajectories, demonstrating Čapo’s (2015) assertion that the durable solutions of repatriation and integration are inherently intertwined. Indeed, BHER alumni forged a transnational in which they deployed their research training to rebuild educational systems in Somalia, while leaving family amidst community and with access to primary education in Dadaab (see also Oliveira, 2018). Others described no longer feeling an urge for resettlement given a new ability to live globally connected lives forged through online partnerships and research.

Perhaps most consistent among our findings, however, was the desire of refugee scholars to harness their research skills to foment tangible change in Dadaab and beyond. They articulated easily the advantages of refugee-led research, and the ease with which they could link scholarly and programmatic goals. Scholarly research was unanimously associated with collective mobilization. Despite this potential, and despite rhetorical commitments by the international community to the localization of refugee research, significant barriers to its actualization remain (see, e.g., Silver et al, 2023). In the absence of publication pathways, access to researcher funding as principal investigators, and a rethinking of policies around refugee wages in Kenya, graduate level education and research training for refugees--made possible through digital advances--fall short of their full potential.

Authors

• Rachel E. Silver, Faculty of Education, York University

• HaEun Kim, York University

• Sahra Ismail, Dadaab Response Association

• Okello Oyat

• Riya Bhatla