Refugee Women, Representation and Education

Creating a discourse of self-authorship and potential

Melinda McPherson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134099825
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Even with increased attention to refugee women's issues in the late 20th century, post-colonial discourses have nurtured limiting representations of refugee women, predominantly as subjects of charity and as victims. Adding to a growing body of work in the field, the author challenges this preconception by offering an opportunity for women's voices

Chapter 1

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Introduction

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This book is driven by a social justice interest in the lives of refugee women. Social justice researchers and activists are concerned with questions of inequality in society – in particular, how some groups of individuals come to fare less well in what, we perceive, should be a community of equal enjoyment, fulfilment, respect, and material wellbeing. As Choules¹ (2007, 463) summarises it, ‘Social justice looks to challenging and changing of structural and systemic injustice in which certain groups are singled out for less favourable treatment and others are privileged’. The focus of my social justice interest is in the link between representations of groups marginalised by dominant discourses and the material effects that transpire from these representations in policy. A strong link exists between the way marginal groups are represented or imagined and the kinds of policies that are made to govern them. Policies premised on limited or inherently problematic representations of a group of people can lead to negative material outcomes for that group.

This book draws attention to the ways in which refugee women are represented in Australian government settlement education policy,² the effects of those representations, and the ways in which those representations might be challenged and interrupted. I explore the broader socio historical context in which representations of refugee women have arisen since the inception of the Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees (UNHCR 2010) and examine the material consequences of these representations in policy and practice. I draw on the work of researchers, activists and community workers who propose new and different ways of engaging with and representing refugee communities, and in particular refugee women, to illustrate the ways in which representation and policy making can be done differently. As evidence that creating different paradigms for representation can materially affect our approaches to policy, I share feedback and analysis from my own interviews with refugee women about the purposes of education. These interviews illustrate the possibilities for representation beyond the marginalising and limiting representations of refugee women that have dominated much refugee policy.

A new century – a new political and policy paradigm in seeking asylum

Representations of refugee women take place in a broader context of representations of migrants and refugees that currently prevail in global politics and policy making. Much 21st-century debate around refugee issues has been strongly influenced by the events of September 11, although other issues such as climate change, the Arab spring, and a host of troubling international conflicts and ‘terrorist incidents’ have also significantly influenced debate. However it is September 11 which seems to have reignited Western debate on the dangers of ‘otherness’ to a degree not seen since the post-war and Cold War periods.

The concept of ‘otherness’ that is promulgated in white, Western, patriarchal, heterosexual representations of marginal groups is of course not a new phenomenon (Said 1978). Its resurgence after September 11 was crystallised in the comment made by George Bush to the US Congress on 20 September 2001, ‘Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’. Bush’s categorisation of ‘us’ and ‘them’ precipitated a flurry of discussion across numerous Western nations about what it meant to be ‘us’ – and by definition, therefore, ‘them’. At least two significant discourses arose in Western policy reflecting these understandings of ‘otherness’. One discourse represents the other as dangerous, illicit and knowingly evil. Its policy manifestations include ‘pre-emptive’ or ‘protective’ measures; that is, harsher visa, travel and border protection arrangements, a range of impositions on civil liberties including arbitrary detention and renditions, and wars. The second discourse represents otherness as misconceived, uncivilised and uneducated. It emphasises the West’s role as charitable benefactor, sharing its enlightened views about civil society. If the problem is that ‘they’ are different from us, then we need to ‘help’ them. Within this discourse, a ‘successful’ migration policy is designed to help them be more like ‘us’.

The emphasis on ‘teaching outsiders’ to infuse normative values has a long history in 20th-century Western migration policy. Policies of assimilationism in particular have been driven by a view that social harmony is best effected when outsiders conform with the dominant norm. Visible difference is seen as the problem; a deficiency to be tolerated until the outsider can ‘adjust’. However by the late 20th century, nations such as Australia, Great Britain, the US and Canada had traversed policies of assimilationism and integrationism towards different varieties of multiculturalism. I am not asserting that multiculturalism was embraced everywhere, but rather that it was a strong element of the normative discourse around which political and policy debate coalesced. The events of September 11 coincided with a retreat to policies of ‘integrationism’; a retreat encased in the language of government’s important role in helping migrants to ‘adjust’ and ‘fit in’.

Under the leadership of Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard (1996–2006), multiculturalism was demonised because of its alleged overemphasis on the importance of social bonds (privileging connections within an ethnic/cultural group) over social bridges (privileging connections to, and assimilation with, the mainstream) (Modood 2005). ‘Dangerous’ ethnic enclaves were blamed for the failures of ‘mushy multiculturalism’ (Costello 2006), and held responsible for the Cronulla riots (a violent public altercation between Lebanese Australian and Anglo-Australian male youth on Sydney’s Cronulla beach) and incidents of ‘African gang’ (read refugee) based violence (Caldwell 2007; Oxfam Australia 2007). The policy message is that difference, and those who are different, are dangerous.

Australia’s efforts to ensure outsiders are ‘clear’ about ‘our’ values was effected significantly through projects and speeches of the Howard Liberal government. The Minister for Education devised a National Values Statement expressing purported ‘Australian’ values to be taught in schools, while the Department of Immigration and Citizenship constructed a Values Statement to be signed by all migrants to the country.

Representations of refugee women in Australia are shaped by these discourses, in addition to the shifting gendered, race and colonial discourses that have always influenced refugee representations. If 21st-century migrants and refugees to Australia are automatically represented as problematic ‘subjects’ by government and media, then policy solutions will be narrowly crafted to respond to them in this way. The stakes are higher for certain groups, like refugee women, whose specific subject positions have been invisibilised, infantilised or paternalised in representations.

Representations of refugee women: a social justice paradox

Refugee women typically navigate a series of negative material and life circumstances. They are survivors. Fleeing from persecution, and contemplating an uncertain future in transitional living arrangements, refugees arrive in third countries of settlement without the capital and resources of most local residents, including other migrants. Women refugees can experience the stages of their journey – persecution, flight and settlement – in a manner peculiar to their sex and gender. However these experiences have not always been properly captured or reflected in the legal and policy instruments protecting and servicing them.

Much feminist criticism of the Refugee Convention alleges that it has not properly recognised women’s discrete experiences (Kelley 2001; MacKinnon 2006). On an international scale, it wasn’t until 2001 that mass rape was recognised as a war crime (AI 2001). And only during the 1990s did Australian policy makers become aware of the extent of torture and trauma suffered by refugee women prior to their arriving in Australia (Pittaway 2001). So it is that, until recent decades, refugee women’s interests have largely been represented as absent from, incidental to or marginal within, mainstream human rights discourses.

The problem of representation of refugee women extends beyond invisibility. Various refugee researchers (see e.g. Bracken et al. 1997; Eastmond 2007; Dona 2007; Marlowe 2009) have noted, ‘a propensity [in forced migration studies] to represent refugees in essentialist ways, the hegemony of trauma as the major articulation of refugee suffering being an example of such essentialist representation’ (Dona 2007, 221). From a gendered perspective, Indra (1999), Johnson (2006) and others draw attention to the West’s propensity for representing women in development and forced migration circumstances as un-agentic victims. Refugee women and girls have become the face of refugee victimhood (Johnson 2006; Pupavac 2008). This creates a paradox for those desiring to represent, support or work with the interests of refugee women.

While we must ensure consciousness of, and action in relation to, the stark and oppressive conditions faced by refugee women, these should not be equated with an un-agentic notion of their subjectivities. Such negative representations of refugee women speak more to the strategies of privileged³ discursive construction (Choules 2007) than they do to any notion of a universal ‘refugee woman’. In our passion to create social justice change, we must carefully consider the tools we use to bring this change about (Lorde 1984), and ensure we are not simply replacing one form of disempowering representation (the absent or under-representation of refugee women’s issues and voices) with another (a victimised representation of refugee women that undermines agency).

The research paradox, therefore, is in privileging representations of refugee women that recognise their agency and resilience in a manner that does not invisibilise the impact of their dire experiences and/or circumstances, especially on their capacities for autonomy (MacKenzie et al. 2007). In this book I draw attention to the acute and traumatising elements of refugee women’s experiences, not as an act of essentialising identities, but as a means of bringing visibility to those important experiences within a broader project that is premised on highlighting the exercise of agency.

Of particular concern to me is the way in which negative or victimising representations can operate in locations that are already concerned with the ‘best interests’ of social justice subjects (Choules 2007), such as refugee women. We might expect negative or limiting representations in mainstream institutional locations, but do we look for them in policies and services explicitly designed to support those women? Traditional theories of power popular in social justice research and activism (such as those premised on Marxism) commonly locate power in a top–down scenario, directing our gaze to a singular, easily identifiable perpetrator as the locus of repressive power. However, the work of post-structural theory (and feminist theorists, as I shall explain in Chapter 3) has turned our attention to the operations of power as local and particularised (Foucault 1980; McLaren 2002). Foucault (1980) has contested a universal notion of sovereign power, arguing instead that power is productive, more in keeping with a web. In this model, we are all complicit in power – and as such, we can all be complicit in the reproduction of dominant discourses.

Such a perspective raises the question as to how we, as social justice researchers, might be complicit in the remarginalisation of social justice subjects. It requires that we explore our own ‘common senses’ – the ‘common senses’ of those privileged by dominant discourses (Choules 2007). As Spivak describes it, we must interrogate that which ‘is so useful to you that you cannot speak another way’ (Spivak 1989, 135, 151, cited in Lather 1992, 120). This accords with Foucault’s (2000d, 256) view that the hope of activism is to be found in regarding all discourse as suspect or ‘dangerous’. It is a case of being aware enough to look for the ‘enemy within’. Responding to his view that scepticism is in fact an act of hope, I intend to conceive of ways in which we might think about representations of refugee women differently.

My comments about representation are not intended to undermine or discount current settlement education efforts. Rather, the analysis offered is conducted in the spirit of Foucault’s (2001) ‘Parrhesia’– the ‘fearless speech’ (truth telling) of one friend who speaks frankly to another, even at personal cost. I consider settlement services provision to be imperative and position my critique of the policy as the type of opining that takes place ‘with/in the family’ – especially in that family’s more critical moments.

I problematise the representation of refugee women in settlement education; not because I conceive of this policy site, or representations within it, as ‘innately bad’ but because I am responding to Spivak’s (1989) challenge to explore that which is so familiar that we ‘cannot speak another way’. Settlement education is an important site through which to explore representations because it is the first site of educational exposure for most refugee women. It illustrates to new arrivals who Australia thinks they are, what education means and how they might begin to imagine themselves as educational subjects and citizens.

Central to the problem of negative representations of refugee women is Foucault’s understanding of ‘norms’. Foucault indicates that those who sit outside the ‘norms’ of dominant discourses – the marginal – tend to experience disproportionately negative material effects; for example, they have less economic power, less access to resources and less cultural authority to speak (as cited in McLaren 2002, 123). These disadvantages include a well-documented link between marginal statuses (whether class, race, ability or gender based), access to educational resources and quality of educational experiences and outcomes (see e.g. Spender 1992; Persell et al. 2003; Brand and Swail 2004). The limiting or negative representation of a marginal subject, who is already materially disadvantaged, is likely to lead to further material disadvantage.

In this book I interrogate the norms against which refugee women are represented in macro-level (international) refugee policy and consequently, in the Australian settlement education policy environment. Settlement policy emphasises the adoption of local values, securing a job and participation in mainstream social activities by refugees (DIAC 2007, 2008a). Of particular interest is the problematic casting of refugees and migrants in settlement education as needing to conform to citizenship values. I ask to what degree this promotes a limiting and instrumental view of participants’ educational needs, and its implications for refugee women.

Engineering a ‘reverse discourse’

Understanding the operation of negative and limiting representations of refugee women – contextualising the problem – constitutes only one ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Representations of refugee women in context: education, social policy and discourses of marginality
• Part II Refugee women’s perspectives on education: a challenge to the dominant paradigm
• References
• Index