Erasing Our Humanity: Crisis, Social Emotional Learning, and Generational Fractures in the Nduta Refugee Camp

Abstract

Ample scholarship thoroughly documents how modern humanitarian aid enacts legacies of colonialism and processes of Westernization through the imposition of foreign values and promotion of ‘universal’ norms. Extensive research has also explored processes of socio-cultural-moral transformation due to crisis and displacement. This paper extends this work by demonstrating an explicit connection between the two. Drawing on 10 months of ethnographic research that examined how Burundian refugees in Tanzania experience humanitarian social emotional learning (SEL), findings reveal various intersecting lines of crisis in the Nduta refugee camp. This research illuminates how SEL interacts with these lines of crisis to exacerbate intergenerational tensions. The self-centric values promoted through SEL and the pedagogies it employs conflict with the collectivist ethos of the Nduta community, thus breaking the Burundian generational contract of reciprocity, solidarity, and moral responsibility. In this context, SEL operates on conflicting narratives of crisis that clash with generational hopes for the prevention of future crisis in Burundi. These generational fractures are resulting in fears across the Nduta community that the decline of traditional Burundian values and communitarian ethos will not only perpetuate intergenerational experiences of crisis but has also initiated the perceived erasure of their culture and the essence of their humanity.