Borders and belonging: displaced Syrian youth navigating symbolic boundaries in Lebanon

ABSTRACT

We examine the ways in which young Syrian refugees perceive and navigate the symbolic boundaries of belonging when displaced in Lebanon. Using portraiture, we identify three dimensions of belonging for refugees – safety, dignity, and relationships – and we explore the role of education in cultivating each one. We find that educational spaces, such as formal school and informal volunteering experiences, are places where refugee young people are at times able to blur bright boundaries of belonging. We also find that this belonging is tenuous and serves to reinforce boundaries of citizenship, rights, and everyday practices that exclude refugee young people. Our findings emphasize the need for the field of refugee education to address the question of how schools can actively resist and counter state-established bright boundaries of belonging to instead serve as spaces that blur and redefine those boundaries.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugee education
• belonging
• citizenship
• youth
• portraiture
• boundary crossing

Acknowledgements

We express our thanks to all our research participants, to Dr. Fernando Reimers, Dr. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, and to colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Mowana Lab for their feedback on the work.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This research was made possible with support from the Sinclair Kennedy Travelling Fellowship and the Dr. Stephan G. and Wanda W. Jones Scholarship Fund at Harvard University.