Academic success as willful-resistance: theorising with refugee-background students in Australia

ABSTRACT

This paper is about theorising with seven refugee-background youth, who have successfully completed their secondary studies in Australia. Using conversations-as-method, the focus is on how research partners theorise academic success, and on the reading I developed in response to their reflections. Inspired by the commonalities in Lugones’ and Ahmed’s work, especially their focus on persistence as an agentic stance in the face of adversity, I propose reading academic success in the context of this study as acts of willful-resistance (Spelling of ‘willful’ based on [Ahmed, S. (2012). Whiteness and the general will: Diversity work as willful work. philoSOPHIA, 2(1), 1–20]). Here, willful-resistance is very much about students’ persistence and a refusal to being reduced to victimised objects. In addition, academic success as willful-resistance works in coalition with other forces within/against layers of entangled contexts and oppressions/privileges.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugee-background students
• academic success
• Sara Ahmed
• Maria Lugones
• Australia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Pseudonyms were used for confidentiality purposes. The seven research-partners were aged between 19 and 25 years old at the time of the interviews and migrated to Australia as refugees under the Australian Refugee and Humanitarian Programme. The stories/reflections and analysis included in this paper are adapted from my now-completed doctoral research project on the forced-migration and educational experiences of refugee-background youth in Australia.

2 For the purpose of this study, I used the terms educational or academic success to refer to students who attained their high-school certificates (QCE – Queensland Certificate of Education).

3 Hereafter referred to as stories/narratives.

4 The crucial role played by support systems in the school environment for refugee-background youth has been widely recognised in many previous studies (Cassity & Gow, 2005; Dumenden, 2012; Ferfolja & Vickers, 2010; MacNevin, 2012; Mosselson, 2007; Naidoo, 2015).

5 The centrality of teachers in creating positive or negative educational experiences for refugee-background students has also been well documented (Exposito & Favela, 2003; Hek, 2005; Oikonomidoy, 2010; Roessingh, 2006).

6 McBrien (2005) explained that family support is key for positive educational experiences and that young refugees may lack ‘the traditional adult support on which to rely as they search for a sense of self, because adults with whom they live may be undergoing a similar search for self in their new host country’ (p. 335).

7 This paragraph applies terminology and concepts from Lugones (2003) and Ahmed (2014).