Schooling aftershocks: Perpetual displacements of refugee youth amid multiple pandemics and social (b)orders

Abstract

My dissertation, Schooling aftershocks - Perpetual displacements of refugee youth amid multiple pandemics and social (b)orders, grapples with the experiences of epistemic erasures emerging at the intersections of securitization migration regimes and multiple pandemics – Islamophobia and anti-Muslim violence, anti-migrant politics, and the recent Covid-19 pandemic (ITSRC, 2020). With each of the societal pandemics occupying histories and geographies that hold pertinent global connections, I situate my research in the longevity of social distancing in the Balkans. I explore how the confluence of local and global regimes continuously enables racial-ethnic-nationalist politics that reverberate through the accounts of genocide and ethnic cleansing of Muslims; the segregation of Roma; and the detention, deportations, and public outcasting of migrants, refugees, and Black and Brown bodies; as well as through the struggles for freedom and claims for justice. I specifically explore the semiotic meaning of the border and how it translates into racialized schooling, surveillance, and disciplining of refugee youth from Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) in Croatian schools—a translation which is itself nested in an increasing proliferation of security and border protection discourses. Based on an 18-month-long critical qualitative narrative inquiry in which I deployed feminist ethnography that rests on intersectional analysis (Collins-Hill Collins, 2019) and the feminist relational project (Shohat, 2006), my dissertation weaves taboo memories (Shohat, 2006) that bring light to the destructive power of border politics weaponized transversally in refugee youths’ schooling and cultural encounters. Collected through the methodological bricolage (Denzin, 1994) – narrative inquiry, autoethnography, and collective memory writing – refugee youth’s and my personal narratives of self tell the stories of perpetual displacements of racial and cultural Others, embodying refugeeness and Muslimness, thus representing double foreignness. The narratives in my dissertation grapple with the practice in which borders - whether territorial or inscribed in curriculum and pedagogies – represent the site of control and expulsion. These youth narratives speak to the elasticity of border politics: it operates as an arm of the (supra)nation-state and tightens the securitized public gaze and biopolitical control over refugee bodies all while solidifying border governmentality. At the same time, the refugee youth narratives counter the dominant discourse and demonstrate that the border is a semiotic site of autonomous crossings, the political struggle for free movement, and counter-narrative to the politics of miseration (Shakhsari, 2020). Such epistemic resistance (Collins-Hill Collins, 2019, 2019), including refusals of epistemic erasures (Nagar, 2015) narrated in stories and memories, yielded epistemic wholeness (Connolly-Shaffer, 2012) and instigated the politics of hope among my research collaborators. My research journey with seven young refugees was one of yearning for decolonizing academic research (Tuhiwai-Smith, 2012) while interbraiding agitational labor and building social movements. Surrendering to radical vulnerability (Nagar, 2019), the collaborative experience of documenting, exchanging, telling and sharing stories, memories, and musings on the notions of collectivity was a site of critical knowledge production. Moreover, I portray the labor of transnational solidarities in which these refugee youth and myself have been immersed. I desire that the examples of social movements instigated within and beyond this research will mobilize spirits, energies, and actions in spreading wor(l)ds of solidarity and hope as a means of dismantling border regimes and kindling the flames of the search for epistemic justice (Nagar, 2015).