Session Submission Summary

Highlighted Session: Reimagining Refugee and Migrant Education: Critical Methodologies, Agency, and Resistance Across Global Contexts

Mon, March 30, 2:45 to 4:00pm, Hilton, Floor: Lobby Level - Tower 3, Golden Gate 6

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

This panel examines how refugee and migrant youth and families navigate educational experiences across multiple contexts of displacement, resettlement, and everyday surveillance. Drawing on research from the United States, Mexico, Kenya, Honduras, and France, the papers collectively challenge deficit-based narratives about displaced populations and instead illuminate the agency, cultural wealth, and resistance strategies that characterize refugee and migrant educational experiences. The panel adopts what Kasper (2024) terms a "diffractive" approach, using multiple theoretical lenses to reveal the "co-constituting entanglements" that shape refugee/(im)migrant education across diverse settings.

The panel moves beyond traditional frameworks that position refugees and migrants as problems to be solved, instead revealing how displaced communities actively shape their educational trajectories through sophisticated forms of knowledge production, community engagement, and resistance. This approach builds on Tuck's (2009) call for "desire-based research" that centers "understanding complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives" rather than focusing solely on damage and deficit narratives.

Kasper provides a conceptual foundation through a "diffractive reading" of refugee/(im)migrant education that puts data-driven decision making, critical refugee studies, new materialism, and trans theories into conversation with one another. Drawing on Barad's (2007) concept of "agential realism," Kasper argues that refugee/(im)migrant education should be understood as "intra-active entanglements" where "boundaries and properties" are co-created through specific material configurations rather than existing as fixed categories. This theoretical framework challenges researchers to move beyond static definitions toward understanding refugee/(im)migrant education as "becoming-with" processes that are "radically open" and full of possibilities.

Koyama and Turan demonstrate how educational policies and practices in U.S. schools reflect ongoing coloniality through their ethnographic study of a Southwest U.S. school district conducted between 2013 and 2016. Drawing on Quijano's (2007) concept of the "coloniality matrix/pattern of power," they reveal how schools systematically restrict refugee students' movement and access to knowledge. Their data shows how refugee students like Omar understand the spatial politics of their schools, recognizing that "The American students are there. The smart ones. We don't go there." The authors demonstrate how Structured English Immersion (SEI) programs function as mechanisms of control that isolate students in "classrooms often at the edges of schools" and deny them access to advanced coursework, constituting what they term "a regulation of the formation, production, and distribution of knowledge that delegitimizes indigenous and colonized cultured ways of knowing."

Bellino and Gluckman examine the "politicized funds of knowledge" (Gallo & Link, 2015) that Honduran children develop during prolonged transit in Mexico under the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) policy. Through ethnographic and digital participatory storytelling methods with four families over 18-26 months, they demonstrate how forced waiting becomes a site of learning about borders, rights, and state power. Their research reveals how children like Rose initially thought "migration was just a little old person that was waiting for us" but developed sophisticated understandings of border politics through lived experience. The authors argue that "transit is not simply time that young people are forced to endure; rather, the experience of forced transit is constitutive of young people's learning about state power and their evolving understanding of borders, rights, and belonging."

Reddick documents the "daily acts of resistance" by refugee parents in Kakuma Refugee Camp through interviews with 16 refugee parents and caregivers whose children attend grades 1-3. Her research reveals what she terms "concerted community engagement"—a context-specific form of educational involvement that draws on community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) and challenges deficit perspectives of refugee families. Parents like Azeena actively support their children's learning by "marshaling her many languages" to provide academic support, translating between Arabic, English, and Kiswahili to ensure comprehension. Reddick's desire-based approach demonstrates how families "choose, monitor, and supplement schools, working to ensure that refugee children benefit from the education they receive in exile as they build lives in the present and for the future."

Shirazi provides an autoethnographic reflection on conducting participatory research with migrant youth in France, addressing the ethical complexities of research in what he terms "racialized mobility regimes." Through his 16-month digital storytelling engagement with newcomer migrant and refugee youth in two French high schools, Shirazi created a "youth researcher" pass featuring governmental logos to augment participants' mobility. Drawing on Benjamin's (1935) work on mechanical reproduction and De Certeau's (1984) concepts of everyday resistance, he argues for research approaches that prioritize participants' humanity over legality. His methodology demonstrates how "in settings in which migrant presence is deemed a threat, researchers must unapologetically opt for an ethical stance that takes protection of participants' humanity—rather than legality—as its core aim."

Together, these papers contribute to critical migration and education scholarship by: (1) developing innovative methodological approaches that center refugee and migrant voices; (2) documenting sophisticated forms of agency and resistance across different contexts of displacement; (3) revealing how community cultural wealth operates in transnational spaces; and (4) challenging educational policies and practices that marginalize refugee and migrant students. The panel demonstrates that despite facing significant structural constraints, displaced communities actively engage in educational processes that build present-day resilience while working toward collective futures. This work advances theoretical understanding of how educational experiences in displacement contexts challenge traditional notions of formal schooling while contributing to policy discussions about creating more responsive and humanizing educational approaches for displaced populations.

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