The Labeling and Positioning of Refugee Students and Their Refusal to be (Mis)Positioned

Abstract

Around the world, refugees are portrayed as victims in need of humanitarian aid or alternatively, suspicious burdens on resettlement societies. These stereotypical portrayals position them as distinct from other migrants. However, in schools, students are homogenized. Here, we contribute to the fields of multicultural education and migration studies by analyzing the politics and complexities of labeling minoritized students in schools. Drawing on data collected in an 18-month case study of a Southwest school district’s response to refugee students and their families, we interrogate the labeling and positioning of refugee students. We show refugee students from African and Middle Eastern nations being labeled as African American to bolster a school districts’ racial desegregation data and being put in competition with Mexican-migrant students for services. We also reveal how some of the refugees refuse the labels and positioning. We conclude with the implications for all students and offer recommendations for educators.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In the US, “labeling” and “labeled” are used, while in the UK, “labelling” and “labelled” are used. To remain consistent with the journal, we use the single “l” except when directly citing the work of Zetter (1988, 1991, 2007) and other scholars who have used the UK spellings.

2 Anzaldúa (1987, defined borderlands as “physically present wherever two or more cultural edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy” (preface). Borderlands are social, political, historical, and geographic.

3 We follow Critical Refugee Studies, in which the term “refugees” can be used to refer to anyone who has experienced displacement, including those classified as refugees under the UNHCR definition, asylum seekers, internally displaced persons, and migrants who self-identify as a refugee. We would prefer to use the term “refugee/(im)migrant” as have elsewhere to acknowledge the complex construction of migrants, but we will use the term “refugee” to be consistent with what is used by participants and documents in the data collected in the study.

4 The first author of this paper and the lead of the case study was very familiar with the refugee support community in which the district resided. She had, at the same time of the case study, been conducting an ethnography study of refugee networks, which began in 2013 and ended in 2016.

5 In hindsight, we wished we would have explored the gendered nature of belonging for the refugee students.