Challenging the dominant discourse of displacement: a letter to communities
In this open letter, Jennifer Chinenye Emelife invites educators, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), policymakers, and the general research community to rethink the approach towards teaching and working with youth of displaced backgrounds. Young people who have experienced war and violence are often seen as deprived but hardly as individuals with dreams and ambitions. To treat them as “welfare recipients” (Freire, 1970, p.74) only is to continue to dominate them while reducing their agency. We must create new ways of working with internally displaced children, ways that center them and their dreams.
Dear Readers,
Greetings! I am writing to you today from my sofa in a pitch-dark room illuminated only with the light from my laptop screen. I am thinking about the comfort of working at night with no distraction, the warmth of this new space I now call home and I am forced to question what this might mean to others without the privilege of a roof over their heads. I am writing to highlight a common misconception we all share about young people without “homes” – the internally displaced who live amongst us. I invite you to join me in rebuilding our work ethics with them and to consider the danger of merely treating them as recipients of handouts. Following the footsteps of Tuck (2009), this open letter is equally addressed to individuals, particularly researchers and practitioners who are interested in creating and maintaining ethical relationships while working with the displaced community, and to everyone else concerned about the pathologizing depiction of internally displaced children and youth.
In 2018, my grade 7 students and I read The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (Kamkwamba, 2009) an inspiring story of a teenage boy who rose to fame despite his poor background. He’d later be invited to speak at TEDGlobal 2007 conference in Tanzania, the first TED talk to be hosted in Africa. Among the few words he shared due to his limited understanding of the English language, one line stood out, "I tried, and I made it". The story of William Kamkwamba inspired my students so much that we started our own TED club. The experience made my students feel like they matter and sharing their talks with an audience gave them a new kind of confidence. So, when, on the Facebook group for TED club leaders, I found an announcement for the establishment of a TED club in a camp for internally displaced children, I volunteered to be part of such an important project.
Every Saturday in March of 2019, we visited the camp and supported about 17 kids to tell and share their stories with the world. The condition they lived in did not rob them of their dreams and aspirations. One kid told us he wanted to be a millionaire so he could improve their living condition; another said he would like to be a soldier to fight back Boko Haram terrorists for forcing them to flee their homes. A girl said she wished to be like Malala and to encourage girls to seek education instead of marriage. A boy said he wished to become an architect so he could create better designs instead of the tents they sleep in which leaked each time it rained. And a girl said she would want to become a doctor so she could bring free and quality medical health care to the camp.
These are some examples of the voices that are often misrepresented. The stories we read about these children are usually portrayed in their most depleted form to secure financial aids and grants. This shines light on the problem of research with/on a “labelled” group. Labelled people, displaced persons and refugees, are often considered available objects of research and such research have been argued to benefit researchers the most (Jones, 2021). By embodying a saviour mentality (Smith 2012) and approaching internally displaced children as statistics or cases to be solved, we diminish their needs while privileging the goals of the researcher, and the funding community. So, when an internally displaced child says, “I want to be a millionaire”, what we hear is that he is poor and hungry, “give him more food”. Policies are shaped and driven by our own framing of what an indigent child might desire but what if they wanted something different? What if they wanted a seat at the table of decision making? Receive the kind of education reserved for the children of diplomats? Hope for a better future?
We must ensure that our depiction of internally displaced children as vulnerable people does not reduce their humanness. While meeting the procedural demands of ethic boards, we must be cautious of our methods and positionality and how these might tamper with the children’s right to participation. I invite us all to rethink our approach and reposition internally displaced children as co-participants. We need to take a stance from which to challenge metanarratives about displacement and engage with the children without trying to diminish or assimilate them (Snelgrove, 2015). The danger of being an outsider from a privileged location like ours is that far too often, we fall into the trap of re-enforcing the same oppression we seek to dismantle (Alcoff, 2008). When we treat knowledge or our work with internally displaced children as a gift bestowed on them by championing our own ideas of their reality, we project an absolute ignorance onto them. Freire (1970) warns that such projection is a characteristic of oppression.
It is time for us to, metaphorically, step aside and allow space for the creative power of internally displaced children to flourish. It is time for us to prioritize their understanding of the world and themselves. When we deliberately make policies and engage in projects that view the children outside of the lens of humanitarian cases, we welcome an endless depth of what Chandler (2018) describes as reworlding possibilities.
An approach that I suggest might be particularly useful in this regard is the critical storytelling methodology. It recognizes that “contexts and relationships inform how stories are constructed, shared, circulated, and remembered” and through its attention to “particularity, complexity, and relationality, storytelling-as-methodology has the potential to challenge dominant narratives and reveal multiple counter-narratives” (Chazan & Baldwin, 2021, p.78). Critical storytelling makes room for communication and authentic thinking – it affirms that internally displaced children can be independent thinkers and so should be co-creators of knowledge and their own education. Additionally, I propose a desire-based framework (Tuck, 2009). Like critical storytelling, a desire-based framework is equally concerned with complexity and multiplicity of narratives. It counters dominant narratives by seeking to highlight dreams, love, hope and wisdom (Gingrich-Philbrook, 2005) of individuals. It emphasizes, for example, that internally displaced children are more than a humanitarian emergency, that they have desires. A desire-based framework aims to humanize the experiences of disenfranchised communities by engaging in a critical celebration (Player, 2021) of their identity, hopes and desires.
These decolonial approaches are essential particularly in our work with internally displaced children. Situated within youth participatory action research (YPAR), critical storytelling and desire-based approaches are helpful in exalting the children’s existing knowledge, forming relationships, and generating new knowledge. For example, in working with immigrant and refugee students, Campano et al. (2020) adopts YPAR as a powerful tool for confronting and resisting labelling formed by oppressive social institutions. Similarly, Simon et al. (2018) in the Addressing Injustices project use photovoice in a youth participatory action research to position students as authors and makers participating in community affairs. In these examples, young people, despite their backgrounds, are championed as knowers and change agents. They are not just a “crisis situation”, “a threat”, troublemakers or any other labelling for displaced persons that has been popularized by the media. They are not empty vessels to be filled (Freire, 1970). They are not just hungry, deprived individuals walking around looking for the next meal ticket. Critical storytelling and desire-based methodologies in youth participatory action research (YPAR) provide the theoretical lenses with which we can view internally displaced children as full, complex humans who experience joy and loss and love and hope.
It is important to mention that in advocating for a shift in our perspectives, I am not suggesting that internally displaced children are saints or that they are perfect. To do that is to be guilty of the same framing that I critique. Neither am I asking us to ignore the discrimination and psychological impact of displacement which positions displaced persons as some of the most vulnerable or marginalized members of the society. Instead, I am inviting us, as individuals in education, policymaking and non-governmental organizations concerned about the welfare of internally displaced children to rethink our approach in working with these children. I offer a framework and concepts that might help us fashion these children as individuals who, like their peers in more privileged settings, have basic needs but are also capable of lofty dreams and desires.
To growth,
J.C. Emelife