Bordering and othering: The governance of refugee teachers’ work.

• In Event: Highlighted Session: From afterthought to action: Putting teachers at the heart of the global refugee response

Proposal

This paper takes the position that the issues which refugee teachers face today, are emblematic of a wider set of structural dynamics about how refugees are having their mobilities and livelihoods regulated by dynamics of both racial capitalism and bordering regimes (Robinson, 1983; Besteman, 2019). Specifically, refugees in many parts of the world today are part of a new racial formation which sees them as lesser or less than humans, and this works in concert with the logic of capitalism’s drive for generating surplus value to justify the expropriation of refugee labor (Fraser, 2022; Battacharya, 2024; Omni and Winnant, 2015). Additionally, political structures serve to place boundaries and limits on the ability of refugees to be fully integrated into the economies and societies of both hosting and resettlement contexts, forcing them into precarious work.

Applied then to the specific context of refugee teachers, the paper moves on to provide examples from a range of refugee hosting contexts around the world (in both the Global North and South) of how they end up neglected, at best, and exploited, at worst. Moreover, it is argued that this scenario is maintained and supported by the contemporary humanitarian architecture which is implicated in these acts of racialization, exploitation and bordering (Dadusc and Mudu, 2020). Presented as a foundational polemic, more than a piece of empirical research on its own, the aim of this paper is to challenge the notion and framing of refugee teacher concerns as technical problems. Rather, these concerns are embedded in deeper political and social structures that need to be contested and changed. The failure of the current humanitarian system to call out and name these structures is emblematic of the phenomena of what Mills (2015) has labeled as “global white ignorance”--namely the inability to call out the racialised structures which hold such problems in place. By highlighting such implications, the intention of this presentation is to identify spaces and places for solidarity with wider struggles for unseating capitalism’s racial logic, and to argue that putting teachers at the heart of the refugee response means fundamentally challenging and contesting the structures that continue to exploit their labor and goodwill.

Author

• Ritesh Shah, University of Auckland