Refugee women and higher education across space, place, and time

This critical qualitative study explores refugee women and higher education (HE), an understudied area, to establish a foundation within HE to trouble refugee women’s educational exclusion. Despite 79.5 million refugees globally (UNHCR, 2020), mixed responses persist, particularly amid authoritarianism in the U.S. evidenced by decreased resettlement where in 2019 24,810 refugees applied and 21,159 were resettled (UNHCR, 2019). Furthermore, the U.S. prioritizes refugees’ employment, or economic self-sufficiency” (Refugee Act, 1980) over consideration for their professions or possibilities for further educational advancement. The theoretical framework illuminates perceptual, sociological, ideological, political, and ecological dimensions of place (Greenwood, 2003). Explicitly, how do refugee women participant’s forced migration journeys and resettlement in the U.S. south shape their thinking about higher education through the senses, social relationships, beliefs, policy, and placement in the social hierarchy? This exploratory multiple case study (Yin, 2018) considered elements of forced migration in conjunction with the U.S. as a place of resettlement and situated refugees’ educational experiences through a temporal—time and place/space—perspective. This orientation accounted for processes and relationships that are relevant to higher education, across the multiple places and times of forced migration. Given this conceptual and temporal contextualization and outline of central topics, this study’s purpose was to investigate the function of place of resettlement and the degree of influence on refugee women and higher education through localized relationships with people and places. Affordances and constraints of refugee law and policy as applied in the place of the U.S. south as a resettlement context are filtered through participants’ closest affiliations, namely either federally funded resettlement agencies or refugee non-profits. Findings suggest these relational spaces of refugee women’s engagement structure their higher education beliefs along a continuum of essentializing-to-humanizing; essentialist approaches impose employment and foreclose education while humanizing approaches attend to refugee women as whole people worthy of higher education