Navigating higher education (HE) is a complex exercise for many students, including those from refugee backgrounds. Internationally, only a very small percentage of refugee-background students access HE. In a 2018 study, we explored 37 women students’ narrative accounts of international study in Bangladesh and New Zealand. Our participants included 10 women from refugee backgrounds. Theoretically, our research was a response to calls from critical scholars to consider the different circumstances that shape students’ international study, and the ethical and pedagogical implications of these for ‘host’ institutions. In this article, we explore the refugee-background women’s accounts of accessing, navigating, and thinking beyond HE, and their thoughts on factors that support refugee-background students’ success in HE. We argue for the need to: reject ‘grand narratives’ in relation to refugee-background students; acknowledge students’ ‘necessary skillfulness’ while supporting their capacity to navigate HE; and recognise refugee-background students’ commitments and influence beyond HE institutions.
Internationalisation and forced migration are rarely thought about as related phenomena in higher education (HE) literature. Internationalisation is associated with movement, choice and brand recognition, and used in international rankings methodologies as a proxy for quality. Forced migration is associated not only with movement, but also with lack of choice, containment, or ‘stuckness’. Some scholars have called for a rethinking of ‘the international’ through attention to students as mobile agents, and international study as situated within broader mobile lives. Our study responded to these calls through exploring the educational biographies of 37 international and refugee-background women students based in two universities: 21 in New Zealand and 16 in Bangladesh. Ten of the women were from refugee or refugee-like backgrounds, while the remainder were international students. The women’s accounts revealed the complex ways in which circumstances shaped their educational journeys similarly and differently. One woman represented mobility in relation to autonomy and choice; but most emphasised relational webs as shaping their access to and experiences of international study, and post-study aspirations. In this paper, we draw on selected narratives to illustrate the range of ways in which family and/or community members appeared in women’s accounts of their education journeys: as a source of (1) sustenance and support; (2) inspiration and motivation; and (3) obligation, and sometimes regulation. We conclude by suggesting that attention to the affective and embodied entanglements that shape students’ international study journeys might inform new ways of thinking about both ‘the international’ and higher education more broadly.
Driven by an interest in the role of sound and voice in producing, consolidating and de-stabilising experiences of the sacred and formations of sociality, Guangtian Ha's recent work -The Sound of Salvation: Voice, Gender and the Sufi Mediascape in Chinaproposes and develops the idea of "fragile transcendence" within the context of the Jahriyya order in China. Fragile transcendence is a form of sainthood that is elusive, abstract, ambivalent and at times contradictory. Ritual-based sainthood, he argues, "creates for Jahiryya muridun a sense of community that rests not so much on authorised texts and authoritative interpretation as on an epistemology of uncertainty, ambivalence and a certain amount of self-doubt that tells one to reserve one's judgement of others, at least temporarily" (p. 9). Ha develops his argument of fragile transcendence by moving from a macro-historical to micro-ethnographic perspective. In doing so, he allows a certain fragility and complexity of knowledge to emerge. In terms of style, Ha punctuates every discussion with open, rhetorical questions. These serve to create a text that always feels self-conscious, hyper-reflexive and open-ended. He prioritises opening up new lines of thought rather than drawing fixed and firm conclusions. This is perhaps a fitting approach for a text that is exploring the innate fragility of cultural traditions and knowledge.In Chapter 1, Ha provides an archaeology of the Jahriyya recitation, especially its Arabic pronunciation. This is a very detailed, albeit speculative, account of the origins of Jahriyya texts, through an examination of key texts, language use and hagiographical accounts. Despite the "gaps" in historical knowledge, Ha provides a nuanced and thoughtful account of the "linguistic multiplicity" and "phonetic interpenetration" (p. 72) that have informed recitation practice in contemporary Jahiryya practice, connecting the elusiveness of the historical record with the elusiveness of the Jahriyya saint himself. In Chapter 2, he shifts the focus from history to the present, examining the ritual performance of Mukhammas. Ha stresses here the lack of rule-following among all participants, noting that participants rely on someone to fill in the blanks, on the imagination that there would be someone out there to complete the task (p. 103). He describes this reliance on an "imagined," "abstracted," and "idealised" saint as "a spectral, invisible, idealised reciter who condenses in himself a sort of abstract sociality par excellence that remains irreducible to sensory perception" (p. 78). In Chapter 3, he shifts to the recitation of Mada'ih, a panegyric text that combines prose and versified praises of the Prophet Muhammad. Ha focuses here on the possible connections between socio-political changes in society and a "speeding up" of the recitation itselfa signal (as seen by some practitioners) of having "a lack of 486
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