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Hiba Salem, Education, Ontological Security, and Preserving Hope in Liminality: Learning from the Daily Strategies Exercised by Syrian Refugee Youth in Jordan, Journal of Refugee Studies, Volume 36, Issue 4, December 2023, Pages 802–817, https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fead055
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Abstract
This article draws on a study with Syrian refugee youth and their teachers to examine how young people, holding liminal social and legal statuses in Jordan, manage uncertainty. Through an analysis of students' experiences, this article describes the varying strategies that they developed to protect their sense of hope across time by maintaining ontological security, or an understanding of self. These findings suggested that refugee youth, unable to navigate uncertainty through their educational spaces, explored alternative ways to actively build hope and sustain a sense of control in their lives. They nurtured hope by constructing a continuous narrative of their experiences, exploring their skills and potential, and forming attachments to ideas of place and possibility. Buildings on these findings, this article argues for the importance of integrating practices within education which respond to refugee youths’ needs to maintain ontological security and hope in the face of uncertainty.
Introduction
Luna’s hand shuffled through the diary papers to land at a final page. At the top, she had underlined the words ‘A Letter to the World’. At the time, Luna was a sixteen-year-old student and a Syrian refugee in Jordan. For several weeks, Luna had spoken of the worry and uncertainty that had often left her sleepless. Would she still be in school next year if her family’s finances did not change, or would she be married? Will their plans for resettlement ever be achieved? Will she live somewhere she could refer to as home? Knowing my time in Jordan had begun to conclude, however, Luna asked that I sit with her and switch the voice recorder on for one final time. She wanted others to understand that while she waited for the future to reveal itself, it was hope that she needed. She searched for it in her school and her home, wishing it would surface in the lessons and conversations that enveloped her. Luna closed the diary and placed it in my hands, asking that the letter be carried to the world.Try to speak to us and help us, not through money, but through your feelings towards us. Talk to us. That can help us feel hopeful about our lives.
Luna had the right to access education in Jordan, studying in a segregated afternoon shift dedicated to Syrian refugee students. Yet, like her classmates, she was increasingly faced with decisions about her life and her future within a restrictive environment. While Syrian refugees were largely unable to access work permits at the time of research, the Jordan Compact has propelled a positive change in these policies, though significant structural challenges continue to undermine refugees’ abilities to access equal work opportunities (Bastaki and Charles 2022). The majority of Syrian refugees live in severe states of poverty in a country with high levels of unemployment (Small 2020). There are also no pathways for them to be granted permanent residence or citizenship in the nation.
Equally, while Jordan shares important historical, linguistic, and cultural ties with Syria, its neighbouring country, Syrian refugee youth remain unable to experience meaningful inclusion within their current spaces. The majority of Syrian students are integrated through double-shift schools, learning in the same buildings as host communities but attending segregated, afternoon school hours. Short classroom hours, the absence of extracurricular activities, and the lack of learner-centred pedagogy have left limited space for young people’s experiences and interests to be recognized within schools (Morrice and Salem 2023). Yet, refugee students’ post-education futures remain ‘unknowable’ (Dryden-Peterson 2017), creating a disconnect between the promised merits of education and the restrictive conditions that face them.
These critical levels of uncertainty are not unique to the Jordanian context. Over 85 per cent of refugees worldwide live in countries that neighbour their countries of origin, where they face constraints rooted in fragile economic and political institutions, as well as overstrained systems (Dryden-Peterson et al. 2019). In these contexts, individuals often wait to return home or to resettle elsewhere, to places that offer pathways to citizenship and self-reliance (Norman 2019; Crawley and Jones 2021). Resettlement, however, is achieved by less than one per cent of refugees worldwide (UNHCR 2022). As a result, the majority of refugees today live in states of prolonged displacement, raising significant questions about how individuals navigate ‘protracted uncertainty’ (Horst and Grabska 2015).
In this article, I build on the notion of liminality (Turner 1969), or the state of being ‘in-between’ to explore the experiences of young people in protracted displacement and the role of education within this phenomenon. Liminality suggests that individuals are ‘neither here or there’, in states of passage that are ‘betwixt and between’ socially accepted categories (Turner 1969, p. 60). In contexts of displacement, liminality is spatial and temporal, as individuals wait, often for years and inhumane conditions, to move from pre-migration statuses to the determination of new legal and social positions (O’Reilly 2018; Malkki, 1995). However, while waiting, individuals also live in the ‘everyday time’, actively engaging with their liminal statuses and continuing to manage their lives through routine practices and strategies (Brun 2015, p. 19; Sztandara 2020). This understanding of liminality moves beyond fixed notions of place and time and avoids seeing individuals as passively ‘stuck’. Instead, it recognizes the agency and proactive efforts exercised to maintain meaningful lives within this in-betweenness (Manjikian 1969; Horst and Grabska 2015). Brun (2015), for example, argues that while liminality captures the constraints and processes of marginalization in displacement, it also opens spaces to examine hope and transformation within these spaces.
Drawing on the experiences of Syrian refugee youth and the ways they manage their lives in protracted displacement, I apply this lens of liminality and explore its link to hope, proactive existence, and agency. I examine the strategies that refugee youth adopt to meaningfully engage with their daily lives and uncertain futures. This analysis of young people’s navigation of uncertainty reveals how they, unable to connect with their sense of self in their classrooms, developed their own strategies to protect their sense of hope across time. These practices of hope were linked to maintaining a continuous sense of self, or what Giddens (1991) refers to as ‘ontological security’. Refugee youth in this study expressed the need to have ontological security to remain hopeful, linking hope with exercises that enabled them to make sense of their life and experiences across the past, present, and future. In particular, young people in this study searched for ways to construct a biographical narrative of events in their lives, explore their hobbies and skills to protect their sense of selfhood, and construct different notions of belonging and attachment to place to accept different possibilities of the future. Drawing on these findings, this article argues that education can offer a grounded space within liminality by creating spaces and resources to support these practices of hope, enabling young people to exert a level of control in their lives and better navigate the uncertainty that face their futures as refugees.
Linking Education, Hope, and Security in Liminality
Young people’s experiences of learning in liminality are universal and are shaped by varying forms of discrimination. An absence of clarity around education and post-education trajectories, for example, is demonstrated in other forms of migration such as in the US, where millions of undocumented young people are at the mercy of ‘temporary relief from deportation’, making sense of their aspirations amidst continuous political debates in relation to their legal statuses and rights to protection (Gonzales 2011, p. 1993). This temporal and legal liminality is also evident in a longitudinal study by Allsopp and Chase (2022), which examines the experiences of unaccompanied asylum-seekers in the UK who are at the risk of deportation by the age of 18. Their study reveals that young people’s well-being was profoundly impacted by the uncertainty of their futures and the threats facing their education, security, and future opportunities. Equally, Bellino’s (2018) work in post-conflict Guatemala finds young people became ‘wait-citizens’ in liminality, having been promised access to their imagined future trajectories through education, only to be confronted with significant structural and social barriers to becoming active agents in society. Poole and Riggan (2023, p. 7) argue that this disconnect between education and students’ realities can generate harm by forging connections with futures that are ‘foreclosed’.
Framing the purpose of education within restrictive temporal, structural, and political conditions remains a challenging endeavour. Existing scholarship continues to explore how education is able to support young people facing uncertainty, and the linguistic, structural, and certification choices needed for their futures, as well as pedagogical practices that can enable their realities, experiences, and identities to belong within the classroom (Bajaj et al. 2017; Reddick and Dryden-Peterson 2021; Kaukko et al. 2022; Salem and Dryden-Peterson 2023). One important area of this literature exposes gaps within current approaches to refugee education by learning from the decision-making processes that young people make about their lives and education in states of uncertainty (see Bellino 2018; Allsopp and Chase 2022). This literature focuses on individual agency and develops an understanding of how individuals navigate ‘vital conjunctures’, the critical periods of transformation and change, that shape their education trajectories (Jordan and Brun 2021, p. 241).
This article borrows a particularly useful framing from this literature, the notion of ‘ontological security’ (Giddens 1991). Ontological security, Chase (2013) argues, is an important dimension of hope and well-being in uncertainty. It is the ability to sustain a ‘core autonomous self that transcends time, place, and context’ without losing one’s sense of identity (Chase 2013, p. 859). This term, coined by Giddens (1991), contradicts Laing’s (1965, p. 44) term ontological insecurity, in which individuals are overwhelmed by anxiety and are unable to sustain a sense of biographical narrative. Giddens (1991) argues that it is ontological security which is needed in today’s contemporary world of uncertainty. In developing ontological security, individuals maintain a sense of order, routine, and meaning in life. Chase (2013) states that this understanding of self is crucial to young people affected by displacement, who can be better equipped to face uncertainty if they are able to continue a sense of narrative around their identities. In their research on unaccompanied asylum-seekers in the UK, Chase (2020) and Allsopp et al. (2014) demonstrate the ways in which unaccompanied asylum-seekers draw on their agency to continue their sense of time and move forward as they strive to counter a looming threat on their legal statuses, concentrating on their time in the ‘now’ through the creation of daily routines and structures.
To date, the importance of hope in education in supporting young people to maintain a sense of ontological security is largely absent in the field of refugee education. Freire (1994), however, writes that hope is ‘an ontological need’ which has a central role in the pedagogy of educators. In Freire’s writing, pedagogies of hope are linked to conscious acts that are put in place to recognize and address social injustice, nurturing solidarity and social responsibility for our world (Freire 1997; Wilkinson and Kaukko 2020). Without engaging with political and historical inequalities that exist in young people’s lives, schools also expose students to ‘false hope’ by assuming that young people will access equal opportunities (Duncan-Andrade 2009, p. 182; Dryden-Peterson and Reddick 2017). Thus, opposing this harmful form of hope is the importance of ‘critical hope’ (Duncan-Andrade 2009, p. 185) in which teachers adopt pedagogical practices that encourage reflection and engagement with the everyday realities that students live through. Dryden-Peterson and Reddick (2017, p. 271) argue that this form of hope presents opportunities to ‘navigate, critique, and eventually transform the structural barriers they confront’. This understanding of hope, then, offers resources that enable students to confront the conditions and forces impacting their lives (Syme 2004).
Building on these concepts, I argue that one important and yet largely absent dimension of critical hope in education is the importance of developing pedagogical practices and relations which enable young people to protect their sense of ontological security in liminality. As refugee youth increasingly face restrictive and unjust conditions in liminality, Chase (2013) warns that individuals become at risk of losing their sense of self and who they are, negatively impacting their well-being. Maintaining a sense of ontological security enables a construction of continuous biographical narrative despite the states of in-betweenness that are experienced in liminality, enabling an engagement with the past, present, and future. These connections, as young people reveal, are essential to being able to navigate the restrictive present and uncertain futures that they face in displacement.
Methodology: Diaries of Refugee Youth
This article is based on a study with 78 Syrian refugee students attending double-shift schools in Jordan, who were between the ages of 14–16 at the time of research in 2017. The study examined how refugee youth managed uncertainty in their everyday lives and how they navigated transitions as young people in liminality. While this article focuses on the experiences of students, findings also draw on classroom observations and five teacher interviews which deepen an understanding of the school ethos and teachers’ engagement with students’ lived realities. Teachers were Jordanian citizens, some of whom worked both shifts, teaching Jordanian students in the morning and Syrian refugee students in the afternoon.
To conduct this research, I designed visual diaries and used them to guide interview sessions with students. The activities focused on how students experienced daily life and how they engaged with their experiences across time and space, including the past, present, and future, with attention to location including spaces at home and at school. These included: ‘introduce yourself, your hobbies and favourite places’, ‘list memorable moments in time’, ‘discuss likes and dislikes about school’, ‘imagine a bus trip, who would you take and where?’, and ‘list your wishes for your life today and in the future’.
Students were asked to complete each activity and raise their hands if they wished to take part in follow-up interviews. Through this process and over the period of approximately 3 months, I was able to ask for continous consent and and remain open to how students engaged with the research. I reminded students that they could leave their activities blank, or choose not to raise their hands if they did not want to speak. Given the high levels of absence, these diaries provided a useful way to ensure that students continued to be part of the project if they were absent on a specific day. To reduce loss of learning time, I stayed at schools and used any free hours where teachers were absent, or during time slots that were scheduled for breaks for subjects which students were not examined on, such as arts class, which were rare and sporadic.
Interviews with students served as the primary source of data, and diary entries and classroom observations as secondary sources for further synthesis and analysis. This article particularly focusd on two diary activities: imaginary trips and wishes and future dreams, though interview data from the remaining activities were also analysed to identify contradictions and enhance nuance. This thematic analysis was iterative, exploring how students experience liminality and explore future-making through concepts like ‘home’, ‘place’, ‘time’, ‘future’, and their desires related to ‘hobbies’ and ‘interests’. Interviews with teachers were analysed and compared to examine common and constrasting views between students and teachers, highlighting how interviews offer different ideas about the meaning of education within these contexts.
This research was conducted by a Syrian female academic living in the UK. During my time at schools, I was able to engage with students in Arabic and draw on shared understandings of culture and places. However, I held significant privileges which students wished to discuss during my time with them, especially my ability to exercise agency on issues that were of deep importance to them in those moments: the ability to travel, visit Syria, study, build social relations, and concentrate on my career. These personal freedoms were values that students wished for, as they expressed a deep desire to be able to continue their education and to leave Jordan. However, while these encounters presented challenging, ethical dilemmas, I approached these confrontations by focusing on the importance of dialogue and reflection. I recognized, through students’ own stories, that there was importance in creating spaces to discuss inequalities, hardship, and one’s story. This article’s central argument is guided by students’ voices and their statements on the importance of hope:
From the first minute you came in, you gave us hope. The idea of the diary and of being able to express the things we are facing. Even if this doesn’t lead to anything and nobody helps us, it gives me hope to talk. The idea of expressing your opinion is important. If you stay silently sad, it’s bad. I want to be able to say my opinion. Basheer in our final interview session.
Managing Uncertainty as Syrian Refugee Youth
In this section, I present three different strategies that young people adopted to maintain their sense of hope and negotiate the boundaries of their liminal spaces. First, young people sought to develop a biographical continuity by making sense of their own experiences across time. Second, students actively explored their sense of selfhood through the development of skills. Finally, students rejected the boundaries of their spaces and prepared for the uncertainty of the future through the acceptance of possibility and multiplicity. These strategies, I argue, enabled young people to maintain a sense of control and understanding of their lives despite the uncertainty they faced. This section also shows the ways in which students located these tools outside of school spaces, unable to see their daily realities recognized within their current structures and interactions.
Biographical Continuity and Making Sense of Time
While waiting in liminality is linked to the notion of an ‘endless present’ (Jeffrey 2008, p. 96), students saw an importance in the present time. Time in liminality was an important resource; the present period offered a tool that enabled the continuity of everyday actions, actions that could preserve the hope they needed for their futures. Salma, for example, felt that time offered a sense of security and tool that enabled her to maintain a level of control over her life:
I know I have to study now. I have to work on myself. I have to live this part of my life that I’m living now, and slowly, slowly, I’ll reach the future that I want. It has to be very slow and gradual; I can’t just skip things.
Salma was frequently absent from school to help take care of her siblings. She saw her future as one filled with uncertainty, and her relatives had begun to discuss the urgency of her accepting an arranged marriage due to the financial pressure they lived through. She wondered whether she would be able to continue school, approaching this daunting possibility by concentrating on herself in the here and now. Salma said she knew that she ‘can’t just jump straight to the future without living in the moments now’. She, like many of her classmates, had also learned to intricately link events in the past and present to preserve an understanding of herself and life. She had lost her father in the war, and her mother had been forced to make a frightening journey across the borders, camps, and finally, to a rural area in Amman. These events were important to Salma, and she felt that these experiences had strengthened her determination and awareness of self:
We have to look forward to the future, we have to keep looking ahead. We also cannot forget the past though, or the present. […] Visiting the past is something that’s very hard, there was so much pain and loss… but I have to think of it, I have to learn from it. I was young and weak, but now I can look back and say I am stronger.
Salma did ‘not want these stories to be forgotten’: they were integral to her sense of self and preparation for the future. These vital conjunctures, or the ‘particularly critical durations when more than usual is in play, when the futures at stake are significant’ (Johnson-Hanks 2002, p. 8), while full of disruption, emerged as important moments of transformation and wakefulness for students. Basheer, while walking me through his imaginary trips as part of the diary activities, listed the events of his life that were most impactful. He described how he was once forced to stop school for a year when his father was unable to find work in Jordan, and he ‘became the man of the house’. Basheer explained that while trying to earn enough to pay rent, his mind was occupied by his desire to be in school and to ‘work hard and get high marks’ so he could think about his future. Several students, including Basheer, felt that their childhood was fleeting and ‘stolen from them’. Yet, while he felt his life as a refugee in Jordan was filled with challenges, he was determined to appreciate the time he had now, being not yet an adult, ‘to experience time when things are good and when they are bad’. His past had taught him the meaningfulness of time, leaving him wanting ‘to live every minute of my life because life is short’.
The process of linking events across time to make sense of oneself and one’s life points to what Laing (1965, p. 44) calls a ‘biographical narrative’. Chase (2013) warns of the ontological insecurity that is associated with the loss of a biographical narrative and one’s ability to have a defined sense of self. Maintaining a sense of self is argued to be an essential value for their well-being (Allsopp et al. 2014). Reflecting on this study that the students took part in, Fatma, for example, stated that what she enjoyed was the chance to sit and think about herself, suggesting the need for spaces that encouraged self-reflection and connection with self:
I liked this project because I learned about myself more.
Yet, the importance of supporting students to understand their biographical narratives was not visible within classrooms. Teachers were discouraged by the frequent absenteeism and students’ increasing detachment from their learning as they got older. In interviews, teachers did not reflect on the significance of classroom time for students in the now. Miss Reem, for example, felt that her students would not continue their education, because ‘they don’t care about their studies […] this is just a transitional period for them’. Unable to understand how education could best support their students who are ‘children of war’ with ‘no stability’, teachers concentrated instead on attendance, discipline, and ensuring their students pass their exams. Mr Samir, for example, compared his experiences of being teacher across the two shifts and felt that for afternoon shifts, schools held a different purpose:
The main aim is that they pass, that’s what matters to schools and families, I think, not marks […] This is different to what Jordanian families expect of their children because they have stability.
In return, many students felt that their experiences and individuality were not recognized in classrooms. Sima felt invisible to her teachers, who had never asked her how her ‘weekend was’. Ahmad, talking about the experience of taking part in this study, said that ‘in five years, nobody has asked us how we are’. While many students had learned to protect their biographical narrative on their own, others were unable to reconcile with the events they experienced, and they felt alone in their classrooms. Yasmine had explained that she could not understand the changes that had shaped her life and that she had lost an understanding of herself. She often sat silently in classrooms, experiencing what she called ‘mental health issues’:
I have been through so many difficult things. My dad died in the war. Then we came here, and everyone treated us so poorly. We lived in a camp and slept on the floors. Life has changed. I have changed. I don’t know. I used to be normal. I used to be calm. Now I don’t understand myself […] I come into the classroom, and I sit alone. I want to be like those girls [pointing to her classmates laughing].
Yasmine’s sense of change in her well-being also points to Chase’s (2013, p. 859) argument that ontological security, and the importance of knowing ‘who we are’, is an important element of mental health that may offer a form of therapeutic process for young people affected by war.
Protection of Selfhood through the Development of Skills
While students dreamt of pursuing postgraduate studies and high-skilled careers, they also expressed their awareness of their futures and the realities that face them. Some students stated that they may leave their education in the coming months, a reality represented by statistics which have warned that the majority of Syrian refugee students in Jordan do not complete secondary education (Small 2020). These possibilities were also linked to students’ perceptions of their schools and the relevance of their lessons. In afternoon schools, school hours were reduced, and students had limited access to extracurricular lessons, laboratory spaces, libraries, or computers. Students felt that their teachers did not see their ‘childhood’ in the here and now, nor did they see the need for their skills for their futures as adults; their teachers, they felt, ‘don’t think we should do anything’ in their liminal states. This was a source of frustration and disappointment for students, who felt that access to these resources was of great significance to their futures and potential:
I don’t understand. If you know that you have students in your classroom, and you know they love learning about programming, why can’t you let them access the computer room? Fahed, male
There should be activities that help us learn. Like we can learn about how to plant things and have a garden. Raneem, female
Their desire for developing these skills was two-fold. First, they explained that they had many hobbies in Syria and interests they wished they could pursue, ones that Sara said they were not ‘allowed to do here in Jordan’. These hobbies presented an opportunity for them to continue to know themselves as individuals, and to ‘maintain a sense of self’ (Allsopp et al. 2014) related to who they once were and what they once desired. For example, they talked about their interests and their favourite activities: to ‘learn to swim, because I never had a chance to do that’, to ‘learn to play an instrument’, ‘to play sports’, and ‘to sing, because I know I have a good voice’. Second, our conversations also revealed the importance of these skills and interests as tools and assets which strengthened their sense of confidence, self, and potential—aspects of their identities that could be carried forward to envision different possibilities of their futures. Sami, for example, talked about how he had a beautiful voice and said ‘I practice at home, and I sing to my friends when I can. I want to try to become a singer in the future’.
Lacking financial resources and safe spaces in Jordan, schools represented a significant space, that if capitalized, could foster skills that enable youth to engage with their interests and desires. Their comments were reminders of the importance of schools presenting these opportunities and experiences that are fundamental to childhood. Privately, they explored ways to cultivate these skills to prepare for possibilities of their future, such as Ahmad, who described learning how to programme through online videos, and Sima, who stated that her ‘happiest moments’ were escaping to her room to read books she borrowed from a reading club in her neighbourhood about law and philosophy. Similarly, Huda, who said she spent time learning about how social media and virtual marketing could open different avenues for her in a space that would not be limited to her physical space or refugee status. These individual interests and skills, they felt, could enable them to envision a sense of potential—one that created hope of different possibilities of self, away from the shackles of space and legal statuses. Youths’ attachment to these skills speaks of the multiple possibilities of the future and the importance of being able to imagine futures that are not ‘dismissed as socially unrealistic’ by schools because they are not ‘…yet materially realised’ (Stambach 2017, p. 3).
Acceptance of Possibilities and Multiplicity of Place
Young people in this study felt, as Basheer stated, that they were ‘just guests’ in Jordan, wishing for the temporariness of their current lives to pass as they expected their future to be ‘anywhere but Jordan’. Students longed to know where their futures might be. Many wished to return home, but as Iyad expressed, it no longer had the things ‘that [they] wanted’. Similarly, Aziz worried it had become ‘all destroyed’. The uncertainty of when it would be safe to return pushed students to think about life elsewhere.
Students’ rejection of their spaces was linked to the structural barriers that made it difficult to imagine remaining in the country. In Jordan, students felt stuck, unable to do anything in Jordan but ‘go from home to school, and school to home’. As students in segregated double-shift schools, they discussed being separated from other communities and further marginalized by policies which prevented them from accessing physical places in Jordan. In response to a question about favourites place to go, Basem’s answer portrayed the isolation and limited opportunities students experienced in Jordan:
I didn’t write anything about what my favourite places are. I don’t go outside. Where would I go?
This was particularly evident in students’ desires to visit places they learned about in their national textbooks and were examined on, and yet were not allowed to see, despite hearing Jordanian students regularly went on school trips. Rand, like many other students, talked about different national sites they wished to see:
I’d love to go to Petra. I wish that could happen this year, this month, and if it could happen tomorrow – well, I wouldn’t mind (she laughs) […] I heard about it because we studied it here at school. We learned about how beautiful it is. They say it is so wonderful there. Ever since I learned about it at school, it’s been my dream to go there, but they won’t let us.
Yet, while ‘waiting for life to resume’ (El-Shaarawi 2015, p. 44) in these restrictive spaces, students also rejected the boundaries of their classroom walls and worked to actively learn about other ideas of place. They dedicated time at home discussing with relatives and friends, and to exploring through television, books, and online platforms, the multitude of nations and places in the world. Seeing these places as possibilities for their futures, students attached meaning to these locations in relation to their own aspirations and desires. Feras, for example, explained how Australia represented different opportunities and possibilities for his future:
I want to see the places I have seen on National Geographic. I want to discover the mountains and scenery. I learned about Australia […] When I go home, I look through photos of it online. It is so amazing. It’s vast and you can go on adventures. […] You can do so much. Studying is also better there, and I know I would be more engaged. If I could go imagine a future journey to Australia, I would be there with my friends, we would study together and we would build our futures.
Ultimately, many of these conversations around place were linked to the desires explored in the previous subsection, as students dreamed of visiting places that would offer them opportunities to explore their interests and selfhood. In conversations with Omar, the life and activities were those that would let him ‘feel the taste of life’. On our final day together, he opened his diary to share a list of the wishes he had written about his future:
I wish I could go to Germany and live there with my relatives because that would motivate me a lot. It would motivate me to study and achieve what I want in the future. I hope I can discover things nobody has discovered, like nature scenes, and I hope I can go diving in the ocean.
There is no tenderness here and I don’t know anybody in Jordan. My sister needs care and someone to cook for her and someone to help her with everything because she is still young. I want my life to get better. I don’t want anything more. I hope that can all become true, God willing.
And I don’t want to be a king, a minister, or anyone famous. Nothing like that. I just want to achieve what I want, for myself and for my family, and so that I can feel the taste of life…because my life is so difficult
.
Omar’s diary entry narrated the layers of hardship that he and his family faced in Jordan, and the desires he held for an alternative reality. Omar, like others, imagined a future without physical, social, and political constraints. While some individuals had selected countries based on where some of their families had migrated to, many spoke of being anywhere but Jordan. Their ideas of place were vast, fluid, and open, linked to, in their own words, of their desires to ‘see’, to ‘feel’, and to ‘know’ more:
My dream is to do and see more things. I want to see life. Nadiya, female
Students sustained hope about their futures by imagining the ways they could remove the physical and social conditions imposed on their current lives. They prepared for these possibilities of different futures by ‘working hard’ to pass their exams so they had a certification, trying to learn languages online, and being open to ideas of ‘new food and cultures’. These desires strongly opposed their experiences in their current spaces, limited in spatial freedom and meaningful experience:
I want to go to Las Vegas and Dubai…They are filled with activities and things to do so you can always be happy. You don’t feel boredom. […] I want to go places where, even if there is poverty, there is progression, there is technology, there are robots, there is everything. I always read about these places. There is beauty, green spaces and water. Nizar, male, 15
In imagining different ideas of place, young people in this study accepted notions of belonging through a flexible and open approach, able to attach meaning to different societies, languages, and ways of living (Abu El-Haj 2007). The time and energy students invested in searching and learning about these places point to their desire to imagine places beyond those that surrounded them. While schools narrowed their already-restricted rights and access to notions of transnationalism, they had actively forged connections with a globalized world that could enable them to remain open to multiple possibilities of the future (Long 2013; Dryden-Peterson et al. 2019).
Discussion
Young people in this study were increasingly aware of their liminal statuses which exposed them to uncertain futures shaped by legal, social, and economic restrictions. Yet, while some of their teachers saw this period of liminality as one that is transitional and spent in passive waiting, students’ desires and needs demonstrated instead the significance of the continuum of time. Against the dullness and boredom that are often described in states of waiting (Brun 2015), students actively employed strategies that enabled them to protect their sense of ontological security and hope. They worked to thread together the events of their past, present, and future to construct a biographical narrative, an account of who they were, where they came from, and what it is they were experiencing. Equally, they rejected the boundaries of their classroom teaching and sought ways to develop their skills to protect their potential. Finally, students, unable to belong in their spaces, imagined alternative ideas of place, belonging, and notions of society, remaining open to whatever possibilities the future may present.
These strategies focused on ensuring a continued narrative of their selfhood and lives to withstand the uncertainty of their lives and make waiting meaningful (Brun 2015; Alkhaled and Sasaki 2022). They became tools which enabled young people to maintain a degree of control and exert agency within their liminal statuses. These findings align strongly with Chase’s (2013) study, which argues that ontological security is an important element of health and well-being; without this continued narrative of self in liminality, young people are at risk of no longer knowing who they are. Ontological security can enable young people to navigate uncertainty rather than resign to it. As heard in the experiences of young people, these strategies of maintaining ontological security strongly linked their need to protect their sense of hope to face the marginalization and injustice they faced.
Young people developed these strategies on their own, suggesting that their education settings failed to recognize and respond young people’s needs. This failure leaves schools at risk of encouraging ‘false hope’ (Duncan-Andrade 2009) wherein education is removed from the realities and inequalities that face students. Education, however, represented an important opportunity to become a grounded space that young people can access in liminality to negotiate their choices and possibilities. In this study, students described their desires to be heard and to have spaces to reflect with others on matters that affect them to protect their sense of hope. They described the need for them to explore skills and interests that would enable them to carry a knowledge of self forward. Thus, this article argues that the links between hope, ontological security, and education are necessary characters of education in liminality. Education in this way can develop ‘critical hope’, inviting students’ lived experiences into classrooms to engage with their lives and the socio-economic conditions that affect them in liminality (Duncan-Andrade 2009; Salem and Dryden-Peterson 2023). The strategies described by young people in this study and their management of ‘everyday time’ (Brun 2015) serve as useful examples of practices that could be implemented in education settings to help nurture transformative spaces that focus on hope, dialogue, and openness to possibility.
While this article has focused on the agency and determination that refugee youth exercised despite the constraints imposed on them, these findings are also reminders of the impossible conditions that young people in exile continue to experience. Discriminatory policies, including barriers to equal livelihood opportunities, long-term legal statuses, and meaningful social inclusion, continue to threaten the aspirations of refugee youth. The findings of this article align with studies across varying contexts, which warn that young people continue to be forced to decide the value of their education against other threatening pressures (Allsopp and Chase 2022). These challenges are also deepened in countries of first asylum, where global policies have resulted in the ‘containment’ of the majority of refugee populations in only a small number of nations (Chatty 2017), and often in already overstretched public systems. As these nations struggle to meet the needs of their host communities and those of refugees, issues related to education quality, job competitiveness, resource sharing, and political stability will continue to shape the prospects of refugee youth.
This article has shown that young people, across varying contexts, remain unable to experience meaningful inclusion within economic, social, and structural opportunities within liminality. These restrictions and ‘bright boundaries’, as Chopra and Dryden-Peterson (2020, p. 540) argue, blur the right to belong and be included within their societies. Ultimately, without such opportunities, refugees will continue to actively search for routes to migrate onwards, taking risks to reach protection and better futures for themselves and their families (Chatty 2017). Their voices serve as important reminders of the implications of discriminatory global policies on the futures of refugee children and youth and all marginalized individuals, who need equitable opportunities to lead safe and prosperous lives.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my thanks to the Queen Rania Foundation, the Cambridge Trust, and Campion Hall, University of Oxford, for supporting this research. I would also like to thank the editors of this special journal for bringing this special issue together, as well as peer reviewers who provided thoughtful and valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this article. I am most grateful to the teachers and young people who took part in this research and for their trust and generosity in sharing their experiences with me.
Funding
This research was made possible with the support of the Queen Rania Foundation and Cambridge Trust. The writing process was supported by Campion Hall, University of Oxford.