‘A window to knowledge is a window to the world’: socio-aesthetics, ethics and pedagogic migrant youth journeys in crisis-shaped educational settings in Greece

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the processes, tensions, opportunities and constraints that migrant youth in Greek higher educational institutions experience at the present time which are characterised by social crises, economic austerity and political instability. In doing so, we also put forward an agenda of critical and feminist pedagogies in developing inclusive spaces of educational citizenship and social justice. Building on a larger collaborative study on youth and migration, this paper draws on a sample of 130 interviews with women and men second generation migrants who are currently, or have been in the past, university students at various institutions in Greece. Migrant youth expanding on their aspirations and capacities harness a developmental pathway of cosmopolitan pedagogies which alter their circumstances and social possibilities. The paper advances alternative discourses in crafting spaces of anti-oppression in the academy through a feminist lens which will cultivate learning communities of equity, justice and reflexivity.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth migrants
• Greece
• higher education
• feminist and critical pedagogies
• socio-aesthetics
• ethics
• social policy

Notes

1 Daniela’s father repeatedly advised her of this; he was a trained dentist who initially struggled while facing exclusion but eventually succeeded in developing his dental practice in Greece.

2 While any data collection technique can have its limitations, Internet based methods are becoming increasingly prominent and influencing researchers’ options. According to Iacono, Symonds, and Brown (2016) there are advantages of using Skype, so they may be embraced with confidence. Given the fact that the data collected through both face-to-face interviews and via Skype were in response to the same narrative guide, research questions and epistemological underpinnings, we do not see any limitations to the scope of narrative responses we have gathered and which were subsequently analysed concurrently.

3 While Helena Smith (2003) writing in The Guardian at the time asserted: ‘The xenophobic attitudes have been increasingly blamed on the absence of a civil society in Greece and the lack of an anti-racist education in a country where children are still taught to take immense pride in their “ethnic purity”’. For a sociological framing and analysis of the incident refer to Tzanelli (2007) ‘Not My Flag!’ Citizenship and nationhood in the margins of Europe (Greece, October 2000/2003).