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CC&&EE Conflict & Education- A n I n t e r d i s c i p l i n a r y J o u r n a l - Engaged Research. Informed Policy. Improved Schools.

Conflict, Education and IdentityResettled youth in the United States

Jacqueline Mosselson, Ph.D.

University of Massachusetts AmherstUSA

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Abstract

Education is a key site for social and cultural learning. For diasporic populations, the schoolplace is an

important site for learning about their new host cultures but thus it may also serve as a site where their

outsider status is reinforced. This article explores the paradoxical role schools play in the lives of

resettled refugees in the United States and the ways in which it manifests in their identity constructions.

Psychology, as a technology of power that forms a strong foundation in US schooling approaches,

serves to reinforce the notion of refugee-ness as a condition to be overcome, even in this era of cultural

hybridity.

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Introduction

ducation and educational attainment are

important contributing factors assisting

the reintegration of identity in exile and

the successful creation of a new life. A key goal of

education is the (re)production of culture,

reinforcing hegemonic structures. Schools thus

become important sites for identity struggles, a

factor which is particularly poignant for those who

find themselves on the outside of the hegemonic

understandings of the self, as refugees most surely

are.

E

Psychology and schooling are intertwined in the

modern US era (Popkewitz 1998). Because of the

many barriers placed in their way as foreigners, a

continuous theme in the literature about refugee

schooling in the United States is the extent to

which refugees advocate in order to gain access intheir schools. Refugees also speak about the many

ways in which they are silenced when they need

help, and then are offered it once it is no longer

needed. They describe instances of their refugee-

ness being overlooked in their school place, and

of it being misunderstood. For example, Nadia, a

refugee from Bosnia, explained, everyone at

school, well they dont think its such a big deal

because I was never blown up. And they laughed

when I said, well, in the war, I was afraid. While

there may be many explanations for each of thesebehaviours, it is indicative of the notion that

refugee-ness is a condition to be overcome, and

once overcomein quotes since the refugees

make it clear that it is clearly not overcomethey

will be helped.

Mosselson, J. (2011). Conflict, Education and Identity Resettled Youth in the United StatesConflict and Education, 1:1( c c ) 2 0 1 1 w w w . c o n f l i c t a n d e d u c a t i o n . o r g

http://www.conflictandeducation.org/http://www.conflictandeducation.org/http://www.conflictandeducation.org/

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Mosselson (2011)

Refugee Youth

eing a refugee is not a matter of personal

choice, but of governmental decisions

based on a combination of legal

guidelines and political expediency, and is almostalways arbitrary in terms of actual experiences.BSurvivors have learned that life is fragile and thiscan lead to a loss of faith in the future, a sense

that is rare among most adolescents whose

assumptions have not been so challenged. Their

priorities have changed. Some feel that they

should live each day to the fullest and not plan far

ahead. Others realize they had been overly

concerned with materialistic or petty matters and

resolve to rethink their values. Many experiencesurvivor guilt, including feeling guilty for

surviving when others died, thinking they should

have done more to help others and remembering

what they did to survive.

Along with the traumatizing effects of the refugee

life on the mental health of adolescents are the

negative consequences in terms of the childs

cognitive, social and emotional development.

These then have an impact on their educational

and emotional potential (Kaprielian-Churchill andChurchill, 1994). The refugee experience also

disturbs a childs overall cultural identity: knowing

where they come from, where they belong and

how they fit into the scheme of thingsin effect,

who they are.

Schools are in a vital position to ensure that help

is offered. Both in the provision of a safe and

caring atmosphere and in the seeking of outside

support, schools can make a difference to the

further adjustment of children who have beenunwitting victims of adults failures to resolve

differences other than by war.

Refugees and Schooling

Community structures, including schools, are

disrupted by war or other events that turn

residents of one society into refugees relocated to

another society. The loss of feelings of safety andsecurity is compounded by the loss of a daily

routine and the lack of future orientation that

schooling provides for many students.

Schools play a unique role in socializing their

students (Althusser, 1971; Bourdieu and Passeron,

1977; Foucault, 1977; Willis, 1981). Schools

furnish refugees with opportunities to discover

and experienceboth positively and negatively

culture in a unique way. As a public institution,

schools are one of the most continuousinstitutions in youths lives.

Schools ideally play a key role in creating a sense

of national identity, a common understanding of

identity in terms of what is imagined (Waters and

LeBlanc, 2005, 129). As an imagined community,

a nation relies on schooling and education to

socialize its young into the ideas, values, and

beliefs of its citizenry (Sinclair, 2002). Refugee

youths witness the collapse of the imagined

community (pre-conflict phase) and findthemselves ensconced in a new imagined

community (resettlement phase), passing through

other communities along the way (conflict phase

and temporary settlement phase). This disjuncture

between their own cultural values and socialization

history and those of the new culture can be keenly

felt in the school place.

Students adaptation to schools is mediated by a

variety of intracultural and intercultural factors,

and a major problem is that these factorsgenerally remain confounded or interact with each

other (Portes, 1999, 491). Schools support

existing power structures and socialize young

people to their roles in these relations. For young

refugees in schools, both the coercive aspects of

social reproduction and the creative forces of

cultural production provide liminal spaces for the

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youths to learn how to navigate the new culture

and society.

Schools therefore play a paradoxical role in the

lives of refugee youths; they may be places where

the refugees are highly aware of their

foreignness, but they also offer opportunities

for learning the hegemonic ways of the new

imagined community. Much of the literature on

refugee schooling points to the ways in which

refugees are let down by their educational

experiences. In creating the imagined community,

schools define a we, and by default, a they.

According to Waters and LeBlanc (2005, 129),

refugees are by definition, people who are

imagined to be nonmembers.

Refugee Identity and Schooling

xisting theories of identity development

can act as technologies of power that

enclose and confine the individual (see,

for example, Mosselson, 2006). Mainstream

psychological discourse is increasingly critiqued as

being grounded in racially biased, European

epistemologies (OLoughlin, 2002). For refugees,

this discourse has been used as a way to

understand refugees regardless of the

background culture, current situation, and

subjective meaning brought to the experience by

the survivors. [And] the misery and horror of

war is reduced to a technical issue tailored to

Western (Summerfield 2001, 96) paradigms.

Psychology presents itself as a rational, apolitical

science, but the discourse around refugees brings

into question its neutrality. The ways in which

psychology maintains the marginalization of some

demographic groups in society, controlsdifference, and participates in the social and

cultural reproduction of hegemonic society

becomes apparent with this lens. Theories of

ethnic identity development exemplify this point;

by discussing ethnic identity there is a presumed

non-ethnic identity, which acts as the normal

an assumed us compared to an assumed them.

E

Mainstream psychology focuses on the individual

external to her own context, and ethnic identity is

based on how a person is classified by others

(Gordon, 1964; Foucault, 1965, 1977; Broughton

1987; Phinney 1990, 1996; Burman et al

1996;Walkerdine 2000). Identity is at leastpartially given for different people in different

ways and intensities. Bodies are marked as

different and often as negatively different to the

dominant cultural system (Boyarin & Boyarin

1993, 713). Historically, theories of ethnic identity

primarily followed developmental stage models,

with linear progress towards a goal, often

assimilation (e.g., Gordon 1964). The implication,

therefore, was that until one becomes like the

mainstream group, one remains peripheral; the

previous culture must be replaced by the newculture. This cultural swap was deemed

appropriate and constituted the total

transformation of immigrants into Americans

(Morgan 1978). The process was unidirectional,

inescapable, beneficial, and, of course, passive.

There is little, if any, recognition of the role that

transnationalism, cultural hybridity, and diasporic

public spheres play in the lives of refugees and

immigrants in the contemporary world. Current

psychological paradigms epitomize a normative

approach with a single, essential, transhistorical

refugee condition (Malkki 1995, 511) that

proceeds as if all refugees have one common,

shared, inevitable life story. Psychology creates a

developmental discourse that regulates and

encloses the range of conditions of possibility

within which the human life course can make

sense: it universalizes the refugee experience with

the result that refugees stop being specific

persons and become pure victims in general

(Malkki 1996, 378).

Barth (1969) defines the boundaries of ethnicity as

socially constructed and socially maintained.

Membership in a certain group necessitates

exclusion of another group, thus Hall (1998),

among others, points out that identities are

derived from identifying difference between

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ourselves and others, but that identities are

fragmented, full of contradictions and ambiguities.

Identity then becomes the mediating place

between the external and the internal, the

individual and the group.

From this perspective, identity development is

seen as relationalthe Hegelian self in relation to

self as well as self in relation to others, to the local

community and to the wider society. If we are all

to gain a sense of self within social reality

(Erikson 1968, 221), why, then, is the ethnics

social reality apparently defined by her relationship

with the non-ethnic? In an attempt to move

away from this majority group/minority group

dyad, du Gay (1997, 2000) approaches identity as a

circuit of culture: identities are produced,consumed and regulated within culturecreating

meanings through symbolic systems of

representation about the identity positions we

might adopt.

Identity also remains about membership in the

nation, and we know from Foucault (1965, 1977)

that nations were established to keep their citizens

contained. Psychology acts as the dominant

ideological [discourse] of our age (Lichtman

1987, 127). Identity becomes positioned in termsof the hegemony (Walkerdine, 1987). In

presenting development in a majority group-ethnic

group dyad, psychology performs an ideological

function (Broughton 1987, 53), naturalizing

social stratification, legitimating non-intervention

and relocating the distress from the social arena to

the clinical and individual arenas (Summerfield

2001, 98). Being a refugee becomes a condition,

refugee-ness. The normative perspective of

refugee identity development is reinforced and

proceeds as if all refugees shared a commoncondition or nature (Malkki 1995, 510) that must

be contained. Refugee-ness is constructed as a

condition to be overcomewhile at the same

time, a condition that can never be overcome.

Schooling as Confining Identity

n the Western contemporary era, psychology

and schooling are inextricably linked

(Popkewitz 1993, 1998, 2001), and together

schooling and psychology act as technologies ofpower that mold socially acceptable behaviors.

The literature points to two main findings vis vis

the school system. First, schools are an important

site for cultural hybridity and identity struggles.

Secondly, schools, in concert with traditional

psychology, act as technologies of power that seek

to create docile bodies and hence miss many

opportunities for cultural hybridity and assistance

to the refugees. Defining how people fit into a

group as defined by particular sets of

characteristics, then, is more than just a way to

classify. It is also a system of reasoning that

normalizes, individualizes, and divides. Children

are treated in certain ways by educational systems,

and this treatment has the effect of regulating

those children, their parents and their teachers.

Reasoning about children as populations makes

possible a particular type of governance, and the

discursive spaces function to intern and enclose

the child within the normalizations that are

applied (Popkewitz 1998, 29). The concept ofrefugee-ness is one such a discursive space.

I

The psychological categories into which the

refugees are placed represent the effects of power.

The categories can be thought of as norms and as

an integral part of the ideas concerning childrens

development, achievement and the interactions

between teachers and children. They are how the

children learn to self-regulate and self-govern.

This governing is:

Not only what is cognitively understood, but the

production of norms that separate and divide according

to the available sensitivities, dispositions and

awarenesses. The principles of reasoning discriminate,

distinguish and normalize what the child is and is to

become (Popkewitz 1998, 22).

Much of this work takes place in the school place.

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