Cultural Displacement in Refugee Education

• In Event: Fugitive Text in Educational Research

Abstract

Displacement signals removing something from its position. That position or site can include a people's culture -- ways of being, knowledge construction, individual dignity, self-respect, identity, belonging, relation, and peace. Displacement takes away from the human. Displacement dispossesses and endangers. Displacement disorients and (can) result in psychological responses such as stress and depression.

In this conceptual paper, the presenter theorizes cultural displacement with Ngũgĩ’ wa Thiong'o’s (1986) Decolonizing the Mind. Critical African scholars and artists in colonial and postcolonial East Africa were seen as radical and rarely talked about in classrooms in the colony and postcolony. Wa Thiong’o's work expanded how the presenter engages with their inquiry with refugee education, offering a tool to reconceptualize forms of displacement from a cultural lens (language, identity, belonging).

Wa Thiong’o’s Decolonizing the Mind provides a means to understand the cultural complexities of refugee education and resettlement pedagogies in relation to displacement. These complexities exist because the displaced (refugees) are not just humans uprooted from a physical geographic space, but rather are humans within socio-cultural and political formations. Displacement places humans in a position where they have to ‘reject’ their ways of being and knowing because the intention is “not simply intended to signify dislocation, transit” (Mbembe p. 15) but a more complex process of redefining the human – the colonial and postcolonial.

In theorizing with wa Thiong'o’s (1986) scholarship, the presenter situates displacement as a cultural colonial tool that positions refugees to see their past as a “wasteland of non-achievement” (p. 3) and whose lives should be remade based on white-middle class norms. The paper utilizes policy documents that frame refugee resettlement education and pedagogies in the United States. The presenter argues that educational programming for refugees is embedded within colonial ways of being. That is, the resettlement education as experienced by African refugees is stipulated and defined based on Western ways of knowing, with the “Western, white, bourgeois, propertied, masculine, and male as the human” (Henson, 2021) and focal point of knowledge construction, reinforcing all that refugee resettlement education ought to be.

By thinking and engaging with wa Thiong’o’s work, the presenter demonstrates how black texts from the African diaspora can be useful in critically analyzing Western educational practices. Additionally, the text provides opportunities to question and rework modes of teaching that contribute to cultural displacement while at the same time offering avenues to contribute to educational inquiry. It is when such texts become part of inquiry that we can continue to work towards fostering equity in knowledge-making practices.

Author

• Mariam Rashid, University of Massachusetts - Amherst