Prologue

Our ­Futures

Currently 26.4 million ­people live as refugees, the equivalent of Aus-

tralia or Texas or Delhi or Shanghai. In 2019 alone, 2.4 million p­ eople
­were newly displaced. That is 6,500 ­people each day, fleeing across a
border to seek refuge. Almost half of ­these refugees are ­children.1 The
number of refugees globally is growing, and all of our ­children’s chances
of experiencing unwanted displacement as a result of conflict and climate
change are also increasing.
Home for many refugees who are newly displaced is Syria, Venezuela,
or Myanmar. They join millions more whose exile has spanned multiple
de­cades from forty years of conflict in Af­ghan­i­stan, twenty-­five years
in Demo­cratic Republic of Congo, and thirty years in Somalia. ­These coun-
tries are not alone. In each year since 1990, between forty and sixty-­
eight countries, making up 46 to 79 ­percent of the world’s population,
have had armed conflict within and between their borders.2 Conflict and
resulting displacement are widespread and global experiences.
Once displaced, refugees now live in exile without a permanent home
for between ten and twenty years, three times as long as in the early
2 R I G H T W H E R E W E B E LO N G

1990s. 3 While po­liti­cal solutions and peace remain elusive, millions of

refugee ­children globally risk spending their entire childhoods as if in
suspended animation, as if their ­futures are on hold. They are less likely
to go to school.4 They are less likely to finish school. They are less likely to
learn. And they are less likely to feel like they can contribute to their
communities.
What would it take to ensure that all refugee young ­people have ac-
cess to learning that enables them to feel a sense of belonging and pre-
pares them to help build more peaceful and equitable ­futures?
I have spent the last fifteen years focused on this question. It is the kind
of question that is not easily answered with a single study. I needed to
shift the nature of the bound­aries that we usually place around research
studies. I needed to look across countries; across time; and across po­
liti­cal, social, and economic contexts. To align with refugees’ lives, ex-
periences, and education that do not fit neatly within ­these boxes, and in
line with emerging transnational social science, I “follow the inquiry”
across the artificial lines that typically bound research designs, sites, and
samples.
The question has thus led me to sit among students in history class-
rooms for a year just a­ fter the end of apartheid in South Africa; to inter-
views with Somali newcomer and White long-­time resident high school
students in the United States; to three years of observations and inter-
views in open-­air community spaces turned into schools by refugees for
refugees in Uganda; to transnational communications with students and
teachers in refugee-­only public schools in isolated camps in K ­ enya; to
work on new United Nations global refugee education strategies in
­Geneva and from my desk in Boston; to interviews with Afghan, Haitian,
South Sudanese, and Zimbabwean refugees rethinking curriculum in their
conflict and postconflict homes; to classrooms and cafés and Whats­App
messages, learning from Syrian young ­people supporting each other to
live, and to learn, in Lebanon. Not all of ­these contexts fit neatly into the
­legal and po­liti­cal boxes of who is and is not a refugee. While I explore the
ways in which legality and politics circumscribe refugees’ experiences
P rologue 3

and their education, my question has led me to adjacent experiences.

Other settings of mass migration, marginalization, and po­liti­cal change
illuminate pro­cesses of conflict mitigation and negotiation of belonging
in classrooms, communities, and countries, directly relevant to refugee
education.
The research for this book includes fifteen years of ethnographic obser-
vation and more than 600 interviews in twenty-­three countries (see Map 1,
page 8, for the contexts discussed). I have been teacher, observer, inter-
viewer, and advisor. Each position has allowed me—­and forced me—to
think through divergent perspectives on and experiences with the chal-
lenges and the opportunities of refugee education within each specific
context and across them all. Long-­term research, focused on individ-
uals’ experiences, their thinking and decision-­making pro­cesses, illu-
minates ways in which par­tic­u­lar histories, specific po­liti­cal and social
relationships among refugees and nationals, and distinct laws and resources
shape the lives of refugees in each context. T ­ hese particularities act as a
caution against universalizing. At the same time, the methods that I have de-
veloped in the studies that make up this book center on what can be learned
when we resist our inclinations to place bound­aries, often artificial ones,
around what we study and how, when instead we follow where the ques-
tions lead and trace connections between places, among p­ eople, and
over time (see Map 2, page 24, for locations and movements of selected
participants). As I looked across country contexts, across time, and across
individuals’ and communities’ experiences, patterns emerged across par-
ticularities that open new ways of thinking about the kinds of education
that enable young ­people to learn, to feel a sense of belonging, and to be
prepared to help build more peaceful and equitable ­futures. The examples I
have chosen to include in this book are ones that illuminate ­these broader
patterns and allow a deep probing of the mechanisms of how refugee young
­people and their teachers are creating t­hese kinds of learning, belonging,
and future-­building (see the Appendix for detailed methodology).
The story that emerges is both discouraging and hopeful. Refugees
bump up against ever-­changing limits on where they can seek refuge and
4 R I G H T W H E R E W E B E LO N G

how long they can stay. Amid this uncertainty, refugee ­children often find
themselves unwelcome in schools and taught to defer even imagining
their ­futures. Yet, despite increasingly polarized and isolationist border
politics and migration policies, refugee ­children and their teachers show
us that it is hard, but not impossible, to thrive in uncertainty and build
new ­futures by remaking what and how we learn. The optimism in this
story runs quite ­counter to narratives of individual suffering and broken
systems that characterize most of what is written about refugees. This
optimism derives from the ­people who do the work of refugee education
daily: refugee teachers and young ­people who experience ­these inequi-
ties at ­every turn, consider replicating the status quo as no option at all,
and become forerunners in navigating uncertainty and reconceptualizing
new f­ utures.
­ ill get to know one of ­these teachers, Jacques, also
In Chapter 1, you w
a f­ ather, a husband, and a refugee from Demo­cratic Republic of Congo.
Jacques started a school in Kampala, Uganda, when, in the early 2000s,
refugees ­were not permitted to live in Kampala and refugee c­ hildren did
not have formal access to school. Jacques and the hundreds of other
teachers of refugees whom I have observed and learned from ask r­ eally
good questions. They ask themselves and their students to imagine the
kind of life they are seeking in a new country. They ask themselves and
their students to question who has power over what and how they learn.
They ask themselves and their students to figure out what the purposes
of education are and, together, how to make schools into places to act on
­t hose purposes. They ask themselves and their students what kind of
learning is valuable to them and how to create it. And they ask themselves
and their students how they can support each other to imagine and build
better f­ utures.
Refugee teachers and students show us, empirically, a new vision for
refugee education. They also contribute new conceptual tools for this
­re-­visioning of education, related to experiences of systemic marginal-
ization in schools, demands for justice in the content and structures of
learning, and the creation of belonging in classrooms, schools, and com-
P rologue 5

munities. They show us that refugee young ­people need education that
enables them to connect their pasts, their pre­sents, and their f­ utures—­a
wish for education perhaps not dissimilar from parents in any part of
the world, ­those forced to flee conflict, ­those marginalized in the place
they call home, and t­ hose much more privileged. And they show us that
orienting refugee education ­toward equity and belonging requires en-
gagement with teachers and schools and also with laws, policies, and
institutions that structure migration and economic, social, and po­liti­cal
opportunities.
The organ­ization of the book follows a similar logic: weaving together
where we are now in refugee education, how we got ­here, and where we
go from ­here; and purposefully panning in and panning out, weaving to-
gether micro and macro, small-­scale interactions and their connections
with global and national institutions. I focus in on classrooms and rela-
tionships among teachers and students. And I step back to the laws, poli-
cies, and politics that govern global mobility and that circumscribe who
has access to what opportunities and where. I show how patterns of edu-
cational practice in refugee education, in schools and classrooms, often
replicate the hegemonic structures that govern international development,
humanitarianism, and geopolitics. I also show what p­ eople—­particularly
refugee teachers and students—­are d­ oing about ­these systematic exclu-
sions to remake the ­future of education.
The themes of each chapter reflect this vision and ­these practices—­
“Teacher,” “Sanctuary,” “Power,” “Purpose,” “Learning,” and “Be-
longing.” Each theme resonates both within each context and across
them. The arc of them, the way I have ordered them, also reflects the
ways teachers and students come to weave together past, pre­sent, and
­future, so that the momentum of the book moves primarily from past to
pre­sent to ­future, while also showing the spiral of ­these three temporali-
ties throughout. In “Teacher,” the longitudinal experiences of Jacques,
as refugee and as teacher, give shape to the sequential questions that stu-
dents and teachers pose to themselves and each other as they experi-
ence learning and teaching in exile. When forced to leave home, what
6 R I G H T W H E R E W E B E LO N G

can protect us (“Sanctuary”)? Who decides what we learn, and with

what consequence for our f­ utures (“Power”)? How are our education
and our ­f uture opportunities connected (“Purpose”)? What kind of
learning can prepare us—­all of us—to take up and create opportunities
(“Learning”)? How can we fight the inequities that limit ­these opportu-
nities, changing how each of us see ourselves in connection to o­ thers
and redesigning our institutions to reflect that (“Belonging”)?
Across places and times, I have found that it is teachers like Jacques
and their students who are the generative and forward-­looking leaders
­doing this work. They learn how to accept uncertainty and adapt to
change. Rather than forward the unrealistic notion that all w ­ ill soon re-
turn to “normal,” they embrace unfamiliar contexts and develop lifelong
capacities to navigate new situations. They also learn how to examine his-
torical and current inequities and take action to disrupt them. Under-
standing the root ­causes of the conflicts and inequities that shape refugee
young p­ eople’s experiences becomes core and not tangential to education
in t­ hese spaces, reducing the dissonance between school learning and stu-
dents’ identities and daily lives. They learn as well how to build relation-
ships across lines of difference and to remake spaces of exclusion into ones
of belonging. Despite rigid and exclusionary bound­aries on l­ egal and po­
liti­cal sanctuary imposed by states, some teachers and students create re-
lationships in schools that are filled with listening and care, that foster
­stability, and that cultivate connections of interdependence. Across ­these
kinds of learning is a focus on the ­future: embracing a ­future of uncer-
tainty and learning to thrive within it; envisioning a ­future that disrupts
current inequities to create opportunities for social, economic, and po­
liti­cal participation; and modeling a ­future of interconnectedness, rooted
in intentionally cultivated relationships.
In t­ hese relationships, often in opposition to larger social and po­liti­cal
forces, teachers and their refugee students blur bound­aries of belonging
that had felt unwelcoming and immoveable and experience how their in-
dividual and collective interests are entwined. They demonstrate how a
major rethinking of refugee education in terms of institutions and state
P rologue 7

governance and also in terms of relationships and future-­building can en-

able a renegotiation of who belongs and a reimagination of how we are
interdependent. ­These new ways of thinking are relevant not only for
refugees but also for many of our young ­people globally, especially ­those
who experience marginalization and for whom uncertainty is the only
context in which they have ever experienced education, in schools and
education systems that fail to deliver the future-­building opportunities
they promise. In an increasingly divided world, we need the examples and
insights of refugee teachers and young ­people on how to reimagine edu-
cation so that all c­ hildren are prepared to address ever-­more-­common
­u ncertainties and inequities—­exacerbated by war, climate change,
­pandemics—­and to build peaceful and equitable ­futures.
 A RC T I C O C E A N

C A NA DA

UNHCR HQ
Geneva, SWITZERLAND
U NIT ED STAT ES
OF AMER ICA N O RT H Mediterran
AT L A N T I C ean SYRIA AFGHANISTAN
Sea LEBANON
OCEAN

PAKISTAN
EGYPT

HAITI
Ca
ribb SUDAN
ean CHAD
Sea
PACIFIC
OCEAN SOUTH ETHIOPIA
SUDAN
M A L AY S I A
DEM. UGANDA SOMALIA
REP. OF
CONGO KENYA
RWANDA BURUNDI
Categories of Contexts Discussed TANZANIA

INDIAN
Country of origin OCEAN

ZIMBABWE
Host country
BOTSWANA
Adjacent case
SOUTH
Country of origin & Host country AT L A N T I C SOUTH
OCEAN AFRICA
Host country & Adjacent case

Map 1.  Contexts Discussed