Refugee women, education, and self authorship

Abstract

Representations of women in refugee policy have commonly acted to invisibilise or marginalise those women’s interests, resulting in negative material effects. In this chapter I discuss the operation of such representations in the field of settlement education policy and draw on refugee women’s voices as a means of contesting such representations. Drawing on feminist theorisations of Foucault, I explore settlement policy representations through the lens of Foucault’s Microphysics of Power, and make an appeal to the women’s ‘marginal voices’ as a mechanism for interrupting those dominant representations. My empirical work entails interviews with nine long settled refugee women in Melbourne about the role they believe education should play in society. Interview feedback indicates a central concern for the role of education in developing autonomous capabilities such as independent thought. I explore the women’s perspectives through the lens of Olssen’s Capabilities for Freedom, and consider the implications of their responses for representations of their subjectivities in policy. In particular, I argue that dominant representations in policy are premised on privileged views of refugee women that de-emphasise agency in the subject. I conclude that education policy must commence from a perspective that imagines and values self-authorship and self-representation in refugee women.