Finding refuge in exile: education as movement

ABSTRACT

The difficulty of education for refugees does not vitiate against possibilities that speak to a life of precarity. This commentary for the themed issue interprets refugee education through the work of Edward Said, particularly his thoughts around exile. No longer a condition only to be mourned, exile is a social condition in the traditional sense, but also an intellectual position that educators may take in order to problematize assumptions about emplacement, home, and belonging from the position of the exile. The hermeneutics of exile provides an interpretive frame that troubles cherished associations with an education that values settling down rather than movement across space as well as time. When interpreted through the exile, refugee experience for students affirms the ambivalences that result when they confront modernity’s transformations, revealing a restless struggle with guarantees that other people take for granted, such as the nation-state. Through Said’s concept of exile, education is unveiled as a process of constant cultural hybridity that is fundamentally contrapuntal, or a juxtaposition of different worlds that co-exist, mindful but outside of a relation of domination. Seen through the prism of the exile, refugee students and their families turn precarity into conditions of possibility.

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Zeus Leonardo

Zeus Leonardo is Professor and Associate Dean of Education, and Faculty of the Critical Theory Designated Emphasis at the University of California, Berkeley. His research revolves around race and class stratification in education and society.