Adnan Turan

This study examines how UNHCR’s administrative category of the “person of concern” functions as a governance mechanism in refugee education policy, stripping refugees of political agency and positioning them as subjects of institutional control rather than rights-bearing actors. Employing Fairclough’s three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis alongside Quijano’s coloniality of power, the paper analyzes five key policy documents: four UNHCR education strategies spanning 2010 to 2020 and the World Bank’s INSPIRE Guide to Refugee Inclusion in National Education Systems (2025). The analysis identifies four dominant discursive themes: education as a mechanism of control, dehumanization and the passive subject, the neoliberalization of refugee education, and colonial legacies in knowledge production. The INSPIRE Guide is examined as a paradigmatic text crystallizing the shift from humanitarian parallel systems to developmental inclusion, revealing how the language of inclusion, efficiency, and sustainability reconfigures refugee education as economic governance while leaving the “person of concern” category uninterrogated. The study argues that UNHCR education policies reproduce colonial governance patterns in which education actively produces particular refugee subjects who can be governed, surveilled, and integrated into host-state frameworks on institutional terms. Findings challenge the assumed neutrality of humanitarian education frameworks and call for decolonial approaches centering refugee agency, epistemic sovereignty, and self-determined educational futures.

This research project examines the experiences of four individuals working in refugee resettlement and their perspectives on the educational needs of refugee students, given their role as boundary spanners. They also discuss the need for teachers to encourage students to use the Funds of Knowledge in the classroom. Participants discuss their varied experience as professionals in refugee resettlement, with two being refugees and one being an immigrant. This paper (1) explores the stress associated with relocation, (2) delves into the mental health issues faced by individuals from refugee backgrounds, emphasizing trauma, (3) analyzes how inefficiencies and lack of support within the public school system contribute to a stressful and ineffective experience for all parties involved, and (4) highlights the importance of human connection. The implications for future research are also discussed with particular attention paid to the need to actively work with other stakeholders.

This qualitative research project seeks to examine the obstacles faced by educators who come to the U.S. as refugees. The three participants in this study are from Iraq, Sudan, and Turkey. While there are similarities between them, there are also differences in terms of race, sex, and religion. While this work examines practical barriers, such as those related to credentialing, it also considers how these educators negotiate their identity in the workplace. Using labeling theory, the impact of the category of refugee and how that label impacts work life is interrogated. Partially as a result of the labels associated with being a refugee, findings indicate that, for educators from refugee backgrounds, there are significant barriers to credentialing, their knowledge and experience from outside of the U.S. is rarely taken seriously in many workplace environments, and, consequently, a lack of confidence can easily develop. Despite all of this, educators from refugee backgrounds often have extensive experience in education and can more easily connect to diverse student populations and their families. Suggestions for how best to expand the hiring of educators from refugee backgrounds are provided, as well as implications for future research.

In this paper, we demonstrate the ways in which the schooling of refugee youth in the United States reflects ongoing coloniality in education. Drawing on data collected in a case study, conducted between 2013 and 2016, as part of a larger ongoing ethnography of a Southwest United States District school’s response to refugee students, we show how the enactment of policies, pedagogies, and practices within schools reinforce the government’s control over refugee students and their families. In schools, the students are kept out of certain school spaces, marginalized in remedial courses, and denied academic opportunities and integrated support services. Using empirical data, we demonstrate how the restriction of the students’ movement in and around schools is embedded within the larger limitations embedded in coloniality and assimilation. We situate our analysis within the tensions and interactions between coloniality, assimilation, and neoliberalism as articulated in studies within anthropology and sociology, migration studies, critical refugee studies, and cultural studies. We conclude with a call for the decolonization of education and offer a practical starting point in refugee education.

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