‘If you write poems, it’s like a crime there’: an intersectional perspective on migration, literacy practices, and identity curation

ABSTRACT

This article offers an alternative point of view on the perspectives that large-scale literacy surveys provide on refugee women by presenting the case of Darya, a young Afghan woman who moved to Canada as a refugee in 2009. It also presents how a community-based organisation for young people addressed Darya’s literacy and identity curation practices, and life situation in their everyday activities. The original study this paper is based on adopted an ethnographic and participatory approach. For the purpose of this paper, only the data relating to Darya was retained and analysed using a thematic analysis approach. The findings illustrate how exploring the intersections between gender, race, and religion is a fruitful lens to adopt in order to understand young refugee and migrant women’s literacy learning and practices. The data suggest that the community-based organisation provided a positive space not just for literacy learning but also for important identity work. It did so by 1) grounding its activities in young people’s lives and practices, 2) aiming to foster confidence building and autonomy, 3) being open to multilingualism and multimodality, and 4) focusing on young people’s futures. The findings also illuminate the need to train youth workers about cultural responsiveness.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugee women
• New Literacy Studies
• identity curation
• intersectionality
• community-based organisation

Acknowledgments

I owe my deepest gratitude to Darya and the youth workers at Le Bercail for their generosity and trust. I wish to thank John Heywood, and Victoria Shropshire who provided comments on versions of this article. I am also grateful to my colleagues in the School of Education at the University of Strathclyde who read and commented on this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Virginie Thériault

Virginie Thériault is Lecturer in Informal Education in the School of Education at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland. Her current research interests include literacy mediation, bureaucratic literacies, young people experiencing precarity, and community education. She also has a particular interest in understanding the connections between the Francophone and Anglophone traditions of literacy research.