Defying Racist, Gendered, and Colonial Refugee Resettlement Practices: A Poetic Inquiry

• In Event: Education Conflict, Protest and Development

Proposal

For us, the CIES 2024 theme, “power of protests” signals a re/turn to the knowledges, thinking, and ways of being situated outside of the dominant forms of knowledge production. In this paper we attempt to locate our work within onto-epistemic frameworks of those forcibly displaced communities we work with and are in service of. The paper examines pedagogies and practices of refugee resettlement education that are enforced by resettlement organizations within the context of the US. Working alongside resettlement personnel, refugee youth, and women, our project subverts long-standing representations of brokenness attributed to refugee communities by poetically (re)constructing the experiences of stakeholders in the resettlement process. Drawing on qualitative empirical material, including conversations (or what in normative research might be considered qualitative interviews) with the youth and women from East Africa, we illustrate ways that they defy and protest against dehumanizing processes of resettlement. The paper positions the youth, women, and resettlement personnel as disruptive to homogenous and hegemonic paradigms of resettlement through alternative and oft-scoffed at onto-epistemic frameworks which are ever-present within our communities of focus. What’s more, we utilize poetic inquiry as a methodological and analytic lens; we ask: how might methodologies of poetic inquiry reveal forms of defiance and protests engendered by forcibly displaced people against colonizing, gendered, sexist, and racializing refugee resettlement education and practices? And, during processes of resettlement education, how can we center the knowledges and ways of being of forcibly displaced people? In this context, poetic inquiry provides alternative ways to engage with refugee resettlement education beyond the frame of western epistemologies and “uncovers expressive relatedness to/with the other and serves as an opening to inquiry” (Rashid & Jocson, 2021, p. 407; also see Glissant, 1997). Within poetics are stories, articulated in language of the poet, the storyteller. This paper makes the case that poetic inquiry is relational, contextual, and non-hierarchical pedagogical praxis that reveals manifold possibilities for different forms of scholarly protest—methodological, conceptual, and theoretical. Poetics as Audrey Lorde offered “give name to those ideas which are—until the poem—nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt” (p. 1). Poetics have the power to open up possibilities for inquiry, introspection, and different forms of relationalities (Glissant, 1997). Our inquiry unveils that within transgressive forms of inquiry, openings for pedagogical practices of resettlement exist that not only center existing forms of refugee ways of being but also rupture dehumanizing processes. Within our communities of focus emerge ways of knowing that are actively anti-racist in nature and subvert expectations of who is worthy of citizenship.

Authors

• Mariam Rashid, Vassar College

• Malachi Maguregui, Vassar College