“I Just Want to Help My Community”: A Refugee Narrative of Transnational Transformational Resistance

• In Event: Inter/Trans/Cross Racial Relationships: Affinities and Tensions

Abstract

In 2001, Solorzano and Bernal refigured how we view student action as resistance in the CRT tradition. Their proposition that resistance comes in different forms gave rise to significant scholarship analyzing the political consciousness of students. ‘Transformational resistance' characterizes a student with a critique of social oppression who is motivated by social justice. I complicate what a critique of social oppression looks like by analyzing how refugee youth show transnational social critiques. These may be read as uncritical if we only consider U.S.-based critiques. Through pedagogical interviews and narrative analysis, I show that refugee youth may not exhibit much outward critique of systemic oppression within U.S. schools, as their critical focus hinges on issues in their home countries.

Author

• Jackson Gzehoviak, University of California - Los Angeles