Openings for hope, resistance, and agency: Exploring the political subjectivities of Syrian refugee youth in Lebanon

• In Event: Intersectoral Approaches to Education in Humanitarian Crises and Emergencies (I)

Proposal

Amid a global rise in natural and human-made crises, including wars, political oppression, poverty, and climate disasters, forced displacement and migration have hit a record high since World War II. At the end of 2021, the total number of forcibly displaced people was 89.3 million (UNHCR, 2022). Forced displacement and migration affect the lives of people differently, based on their race, ethnicity, and gender. Nevertheless, both have challenged traditional notions of citizenship within and across borders; specifically, citizenship as legal status, obligations, and institutions within a nation-state, leading to normative and functional implications politically, socially, culturally, and educationally (Isin, 2015). Schools contribute to the development of the modern citizen who shares legitimate expressions of national identity with other community members, establishing boundaries between the ‘we’ and the ‘them’ of citizenship (Waters and LeBlanc, 2005). Including refugees in national education systems shepherded a new era of refugee education that challenges where refugees are in the national imaginaries, their future visions, and their capacity for political action (Dryden-Peterson, 2020). Research on how refugees develop their political subjectivities inside and outside schools is very limited. This leaves out the more essential questions of citizenship and citizenship education, which are important to improving the content and conditions of formal and nonformal refugee education.

Investigating citizenship cannot be insulated from engagement with colonialism and the West’s modernity project (Isin, 2015). The formation of the nation-state following the end of World War II is a product of the West’s post-colonial development project. This project was advanced as a combination of internal good policy, democratic governance, and mass education (Griffiths, 2021). The established modern nation-state adopted a set model of citizenship defining the state-citizenship relationship through a set of rights and duties (Isin and Nyers, 2014). This model neglects the influence of one’s experience and position in the social order on the construction or contestation of citizenship. It becomes even more irrelevant for refugees and refugeehood. Forced to move between geographical and symbolic spaces, they constantly disrupt and extend the frontiers of citizenship and political belonging as they come into political being in manifold ways based on the interplay of class, race, gender, sexual orientation, and religious identity and how they are embodied in displacement contexts.

This study adopts a decolonial framework to investigate citizenship that leads to a new articulation of ‘citizen’ and a reinvention of political representations that decenter hegemonic Western thought. A decolonial framework offers an understanding of often silenced socio-political realities and lived experiences (Mignolo, 2018), providing an alternative lens to investigate citizenship as it is reinvented by those outside the triad of the citizen-state-nation. To achieve that, the study considers citizenship an agential process of subjectification and a site for active resistance (Ong, 1996). It invites the plurality of refugee voices and experiences, destabilizing dominant narratives of refugees as vulnerable victims or de-historicized and apolitical people (Malkki, 1995). Acts of citizenship – a concept developed by Isin (2008) – will be adopted to expand how citizenship has been studied and to understand the social, political, cultural, and symbolic practices through which subjects constitute themselves and their realities. Expressed as everyday individual or collective political acts, these acts actively disrupt the established socio-political order (Isin, 2012). They also include ethical, cultural, sexual, and social ways of being together, creating new possibilities for refugees and claiming rights (Isin and Nielsen, 2008).

Examining refugees’ citizenship acts is a promising conceptual pathway to understand how refugees construct their political subjectivities. It looks at how refugees challenge the dynamics of established citizenship and belonging and how they expose the paradoxes of enclosed and enclosing citizenship which limit participation to those who belong to a nation-state based on their status as citizens (Isin, 2012). Acts of citizenship, however, transform humans into political subjects capable of reinventing their political subjectivities, contributing to a new theory and praxis of citizenship, transforming what we understand by political participation and representation that includes the unrepresentable in ways traditional citizenship does not account for or even has the possibilities to offer.

In this study, I focus on forced displacement and the experience of the refugee as a category that differs from being a migrant. I am interested in understanding how Syrian refugee youth reinvent their political subjectivities in displacement contexts from a decolonial perspective. Specifically, the study aims to investigate how Syrian refugee youth constitute themselves as citizens in their everyday lives within socio-political challenges and openings for hope and agency in Lebanon. To explore how Syrian refugee youth constitute themselves as citizens in their everyday lives, I conducted a qualitative case study (Stake, 1995). Conducting this kind of research allowed me to reveal data about the lives of Syrian refugee youth inside and outside school, develop an in-depth understanding of the opportunities they have for developing their political subjectivities and to account for the context in which this happens without interrupting the research setting. I used multiple data collection methods to explore the lives of refugee youth in Lebanon. First, I actively engaged refugee youth in representing the everyday acts, spaces and conditions that enable them to reimagine and enact their political subjectivities inside and outside school through photovoice. Photovoice encourages individuals to record and represent their lived experiences and engage in a critical dialogue about issues affecting them (Wang and Burris, 1997), generating sensitive, original, and experiential accounts of their lives. I provided refugee youth with instructions on how to participate in this activity while complying with confidentiality and privacy considerations. Following this task, I invited youth to participate in individual discussions to talk about their photos and unpack the meanings they attach to the photos. To capture the types of roles and nature of relationships refugees have and maintain, I conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews. Lastly, I used memoing as a research method to record what I experience and think during the data collection process (Miles et al., 2014). Data analysis followed the thematic analysis technique to systematically identify and organize the data into common patterns of meaning (Braun & Clarke, 2012).

Author

• Samaya Mansour, Columbia University Teachers College