An American University in loco patriae: Afghan Students Learning in Crisis

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Higher Education in Times of Crises: Institutional Responses and Resilience During and After Conflict

Proposal

Relevance & Background

We hope to contribute to this year’s 2025 CIES conference with our work that falls within the broader discourse in comparative education scholarship on education in emergencies. In this presentation we will share the experiences of Afghan refugee students who were temporarily relocated from the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF) to the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS) following the return of the Taliban. Our case presents a stark contrast to traditional international student mobility associated with privilege and choice. Rather, these Afghan students were designated as “study abroad” participants for administrative purposes, but their reality was far from the customary label associated within the traditional study abroad student profile. Turning the notion of a university’s relationship to students as in loco parentis¬¬, acting in the place of a parent, our case shows how a university acted in loco patriae, in place of a country.

Our study and its findings highlight the unique challenges and opportunities displaced students face, and underscores the urgency of developing inclusive policies to recognize diverse forms of educational mobility and the critical role that higher education institutions must play in supporting these learners.

Context
Today there are large numbers of eligible students engaging in mobility not out of choice to experience study abroad, but because they have been displaced from their home countries just to survive and are searching for how they can continue their educational trajectories. They have not chosen their study destination for a yearning to broaden their horizons or boost economic opportunities, so much as to seek a haven where they can revive their interrupted educational aspirations (Brunner, Streitwieser, & Bhandari 2023; Ergin, DeWit, & Leask 2019; Streitwieser 2019). The numbers between internationally mobile students and those who are forcibly displaced engaging in tertiary education is striking. According to UNESCO (2024), cross-border movement by choice involves 6.4 million international students globally—students who “undertake all or part of their higher education experience in a country other than their home country” (IIE 2024). But global cross-border movement by force involves nearly twice as many people of tertiary age where, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (2022), there are now 11.4 million forcibly displaced 15-24-year-olds. Those participants in higher education mobility are generally not reflected in the data nor in the scholarship on international education.

Mode of Inquiry

Research question: Our study aimed to understand the impact of educational displacement on refugee students’ academic and personal wellbeing. Through analysis of our interview data, we sketched out four key learning narratives: Academic learning, Personal learning, Social learning, and Pragmatic learning. These narratives are not only informative for scholars analyzing new forms of internationalization that is responsive to the noted evolving demographic mobility trends, but are also instructive for policymakers and administrative staff responsible for crisis management for refugee students.

Interviews: We investigated the case of displaced AUAF students through semi-structured interviews from two cohorts that arrived in Iraq in August and October of 2021. We gathered additional data in text messages, emails, documents, photos, videos, and conferences. Overall, ten students participated in 18 interviews over one year. The first interviews were conducted during a research visit to Iraq, and the second over Zoom. The interviews asked about the students’ fields of study; their experiences at AUIS; their perceptions of the host institution and how they were treated; their schedules; similarities and differences between AUAF and AUIS; challenges adjusting to a new environment; interacting with AUIS peers; life in Iraq and community engagement; and their plans and aspirations for the next five years.

Findings
Understanding the unique case of these university students’ displacement and resilience in higher education contributes to a body of emerging research now emerging on the impact of learners in ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, and elsewhere.

The findings from our interviews with AUAF students corroborate literature that advocates implementing diverse refugee support services, including helping with adapting to a new academic environment, social integration, personal learning, and dealing with practical everyday life concerns. Our case also offers insights that align with and add to the narratives on the importance of building in support for refugee students’ integration into their new environments. The literature discusses such challenges as mental health support, community integration, curriculum adjustment, and financial aid. The AUIS as an institution exemplified a university that went beyond its means and perhaps even its best judgment to provide multifaceted support, despite all the difficulties the staff and students would face. Finally, our findings reveal gaps in the literature that mainly represent refugee students as being traumatized and vulnerable. This perspective overlooks refugee students’ agency, resilience, leadership, and ambition. The AUAF students did not position themselves as victims, rather they saw themselves as future change makers, taking responsibility for their families and aspiring to improve themselves and one day perhaps their home country’s recovery again.

Conclusion
The customary study abroad model the field has analyzed since the earliest days of the ‘grand tour’ is a simple trajectory from home country to host country and back to home country: A to B back to A. Our case upsets this well-trodden path. The AUAF students were forced into an open itinerary where they did not end up returning to their starting point. In reflecting on their experiences, our research challenged two notions prominent but erroneous in the studies of migration and education to date: all students who matter are not being counted as participants in educational mobility; and refugee students are still seen as disadvantaged victims in need of charity when they are anything but. Our AUAF student sample represents but a grain of sand among a massive demographic of learners who have been overlooked by the research.

Authors

• Bernhard T Streitwieser, George Washington University

• Kyle Long, The George Washington University

• Nina Balandina, Graduate School of Education and Human Development, GW