Power and Education
ISSN 1757-7438

CONTENTS [click on author's name for abstract and full text]

Transitions from Exile to Academia: experiences and identities of refugee women teachers from the former Yugoslavia

SNEŽANA RATKOVIĆ Faculty of Education, Brock University, St Catharines, Canada

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/power.2011.3.3.196

Western academic literature frequently represents refugee women through the lens of deficit, particularly as powerless victims of war, rape, domestic violence, and mental disorder. This representation is, however, limited in scope and problematic in its colonising nature. This article explores the experiences of three refugee women teachers from the former Yugoslavia who immigrated to Ontario and Quebec during and after the Yugoslav wars (1991‑1995) and whose narratives remain largely outside the master narrative of exile and settlement research. These women’s stories challenge the image of a victimised and submissive refugee woman in the Canadian context and bring to the centre of the discourse the image of a refugee woman who is an aspiring academic. Through narrative inquiry, the ‘storying stories’ model, transcript poems and personal narrative of the researcher this article explores the issues of gender, forced migrations, and academic identity.

Access Denied: refugee children and the exclusionary logic of the education system in England

SARAH WALKER Education Department, London South Bank University, United Kingdom

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/power.2011.3.3.210

This article aims to show that, as refugee children occupy a contested space between asylum and children’s rights frameworks, the contradictory interplay between the two serves to disempower and disadvantage. The article argues that these children are thus subject to an exclusionary logic, enforced by ‘gatekeepers’ in the form of schools and local authorities, who hold the power to deny access to education. Drawing on empirical research conducted as part of the author’s role as a research assistant for the Supporting and Mentoring in Learning and Education (SMILE) project at the British Refugee Council, it argues that mentoring can act as a mechanism to transfer knowledge, with volunteers acting as guides to negotiate power structures and empower refugee children to access the education they are entitled to.

Power, Education and Migration into Ireland

MERIKE DARMODY Social Research Department, Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), Dublin, Ireland

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/power.2011.3.3.224

Due to globalisation, recent decades have seen a rapid change in the demographic and cultural composition of countries across Europe. The number of migrant children in the receiving countries has also increased. In this framework, the right to education of migrant children and equality of access to schools has become an important policy issue. This article focuses on the ways schools in Ireland address increased cultural diversity among the pupil population and in so doing discusses the overt and covert power relations present in the education system that are likely to disadvantage migrant pupils. It draws on teachers’ perspectives with regard to their perception of migrant students as well as the perspectives of native Irish and migrant pupils. The article utilises data gathered for a large-scale mixed methods study on the experiences of ethnic minority children in Irish schools, the first of its kind in Ireland. The analysis of the data highlights the unequal power dynamics in schools system and how this impacts on the experiences of migrant students and their parents.

This Land is Our Land? Multiple Literacies and Becoming-Citizen in an Adult ESL Classroom

MONICA WATERHOUSE Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa, Canada

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/power.2011.3.3.238

Unprecedented levels of global migration have produced pluralistic nations where citizenship education can pose a complex challenge. In these contexts, government-funded language instruction programs for new immigrants have become important sites, where politically charged debates around citizenship and how to teach it play out. This article considers the intersections of citizenship education, power, multiple literacies, and curriculum in a Canadian adult immigrant language program mandated to facilitate the integration of newcomers. Deleuze & Guattari’s conceptual repertoire, along with the Deleuzian-informed Multiple Literacies Theory, frame an analysis of qualitative data focusing on a singular classroom event: the singing of a folk song. This research follows lines of power: state power as pouvoir operating through the order-word ‘multiculturalism’, and life’s affective power as puissance operating through reading texts disruptively in the classroom. These molar lines and lines of flight run between nation-state citizenship as an integrative outcome premised on sameness, and the concept of ‘becoming-citizen’ as an untimely process premised on difference. Considering the implications of this analysis for classroom practice, ‘rhizocurriculum’ is posited as a way to reimagine citizenship in ways that can account for the revolutionary, transformative effects of difference.

‘Are You Able ... to Learn?’: power and access to higher education for African refugees in the USA

KRISTEN H. PERRY & CHRISTINE A. MALLOZZI Department of Curriculum & Instruction, University of Kentucky, USA

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/power.2011.3.3.249

Using discourse analysis focused on identity and politics, we analyze the narratives of two Congolese refugees to explore issues of access to higher education. Data for this analysis come from a larger ethnographic study of educational opportunities for refugees in one US city. The narratives that these participants tell reveal both the ways in which various institutional factors limited their access to higher education and the agentive ways in which these refugees advocated for themselves. Refugees’ educational experiences and aspirations may be invisible to those in power in resettlement contexts, or those in power may question, doubt, or ignore such experiences and aspirations. As a result, various institutions act as gatekeepers to limit refugees’ access to higher education.

Looking beyond the Obvious: power, epistemic culture and student migration in the knowledge-based economy

YASMIN Y. ORTIGA Sociology Department, Syracuse University, Syracuse, USA

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/power.2011.3.3.263

The emergence of the knowledge-based economy revived the brain drain debate of the 1970s, calling for the recruitment of scientists and researchers in the interest of national development. International students find themselves in the middle of this debate, as developing countries struggle to address the growing number of those choosing not to return home after graduation. While most researchers explain student migration in terms of economic opportunity and incentives, this article argues that this approach ignores the epistemic culture of graduate training and the differential power of academic institutions in developed and developing nations. Based on a sample of Filipino PhD students in science, technology, engineering or math (STEM) fields, this article shows how international students internalize research practices and values that encourage them to remain in the USA. I also discuss how these values contradict the research culture within developing countries, making it difficult for students to imagine continuing their work if they returned home. Consequently, this article challenges how the brain drain narrative describes knowledge as an intellectual product, easily transferred across national borders. Rather, the article emphasizes the need to recognize knowledge as a process of production, where shared norms define how new scholars are expected to contribute to their fields.

Religion, Forced Migration and Schooling: varying influences of religious capital among Iraqi Christian refugee students in Jordan and the USA

BRUCE ANTHONY COLLET School of Educational Foundations, Leadership and Policy, College of Education and Human Development, Bowling Green State University, USA

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/power.2011.3.3.274

This study is based on focus groups conducted with Christian Iraqi refugee secondary school students in the metropolitan Detroit area, and interviews with staff from volunteer aide agencies, non-governmental organizations, churches, and independent researchers in both Amman, Jordan as well as the Detroit metropolitan area. The article examines varying influences of religious capital among Iraqi Christian students. Examination of the operation of this capital within the context of the two countries’ economic and foreign policy interests including their refugee policies exposes macro-level forces that render religious capital to function in countervailing manners. Iraqi Christian students in both Amman and Detroit experience the reverberating affects of an inverse relationship between their religious capital and their ability to live a stable and secure life in Iraq. Moreover, the ability of Iraqi refugees to wield their religious capital to their advantage in schooling is highly mediated by a dominant ideology within Jordan that positions them as ‘foreigners’, a restricted US refugee policy limiting the numbers allowed in, and a prevailing ideology within the USA that treats migrants from the Arab world as ‘suspect’ and potential threats to public safety and national security.

The ‘Why, What and How’ of Inclusion from the Practitioner’s Point of View: inclusion of immigrant children in the Norwegian educational system

VELIBOR BOBO KOVAČ & MARYANN JORTVEIT Faculty of Humanities and Education, University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/power.2011.3.3.289

The aim of the article is to explore teachers’ perceptions of the concept of multicultural inclusion. The study adopts a qualitative approach where 14 individual semi-structured interviews have been used to assess and analyse teachers’ reflections when considering the ‘why, what and how’ questions surrounding inclusion. The overall findings indicate that teachers view multicultural inclusion as a desirable and positive process which should be practised in contemporary schools. However, the findings also indicate that teachers use rather common and imprecise terms and generally hold that this process is straightforward and unproblematic in terms of its definition. This is further supported in reported tendencies to implement inclusive measures in a fairly unorganized and intuitive manner. The challenges associated with definitions and practices of inclusion are discussed along with the positions of teachers in terms of power. The article concludes with outlining the possible limitations and implications of the study.

The Bologna Process: a tool for Europe’s hegemonic project on Africa

JEAN-ÉMILE CHARLIER & SARAH CROCHÉ Faculty of Economics, Political, Social and Communication Sciences, Université Catholique de Louvain – UCL Mons, Belgium

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/power.2011.3.3.304

This article treats the Bologna Process as a tool that European countries used for their hegemonic project on Africa’s higher education. It is based on a normative perspective in which it is proposed that the creation of the worldwide higher education area should be a place of knowledge circulation where all scientists can collaborate in a free and open way, and that the ultimate goal of science is to make the world a better, easier and more just place. This article attempts to explain how the Foucauldian concept of ‘apparatus’ can help us understand the attitude of the European countries with regard to the Bologna Process and why, since 2003, they have not associated African countries with the process despite establishing relationships with other world regions. The article will analyse the long-term disregard of Europe for Africa and will show how and why the attitude of the Bologna Process’ actors (especially the European Commission and the European University Association [EUA]) towards Africa has been evolving since 2007. Finally, this article will explain why the 3‑5‑8 or Licence-Master-Doctorate (LMD) Bologna model’s transfer in Africa does not give fair results today.

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