Race and Refugeity: Ethnocinema as Radical Pedagogy

Abstract

This article introduces Cross-Marked: Sudanese Australian Young Women Talk Education, a series of seven short films made collaboratively with Sudanese young women from refugee backgrounds, examining their education experiences in Australia. The author frames this research through the emerging practice of ethnocinema and its relationship with ethnographic documentary. The coparticipants examine the prevailing social conditions for connectedness/disconnectedness in the context of a sometimes-hostile contemporary educational climate, as does the author/researcher through autoethnographic reflections on practice. The films use a “performative ethnography” to disrupt the folds and pleats of conventional stories told of and about the pedagogies of belonging and becoming. The films draw on the informants’ social practices of self to trouble teleological narratives of identity, and they offer a territory of possibilities for learning to “see more critically, think at a more critical level, and to recognise the forces that subtly shape their lives” (Kincheloe & McLaren)

Critical Ethnographies of Education and for Social and Educational Transformation: A Meta-Ethnography

“…Freire (1970) calls this process of gaining critical consciousness a process of conscientization. The first step is to take sides and commit to working in the interests of change (Ares, 2016; Beach, 2010) and with as much mutual trust as possible (Beach & Sernhede, 2012; Dixson et al, 2015; Harris, 2010). High familiarity with and extensive firsthand knowledge about the social and material conditions and interests of those whose lives are being researched and represented, helps to close social distance and establish strong objectivity (Harding, 1995; Thomas, 1993; Weis & Fine, 2018).…”

“…On one hand, the experiences demonstrated that although the people of marginalized communities may not have been as formally successful as others at school, these people did not need special help to learn (Dixson et al, 2015;Dovemark & Beach, 2016;Lundberg, 2015;Widigson, 2013b). They could and did do this already: and often very well indeed (Dixson et al, 2015;Dovemark & Beach, 2016;Lundberg, 2015;Widigson, 2013b;Beach & Sernhede, 2012Harris, 2010), even while using a "new" (second or even third) language as a medium of communication (Beach, 2006;Beach & Vigo, 2020;Bouakaz, 2007) So not only could they learn, they were also very capable learners whose learning forced researchers who were researching them to develop their own critical reflections about how educational organizations work for or against the interests of those they are normally understood to exist for. There was a process of double conscientization (Léonard, 2015), within which researchers transformed their grasp of reality and their work.…”

‘I’m a Local…’

“…John's narrative demonstrates the tendency of dominant discourses to inadvertently 'fix' or freeze the refugee subject within a static 'refugee identity'. Instead, as an emerging conceptual framework of 'refugeity' suggests, being a refugee may be better understood as a process, a fluid and temporary state, which many former refugees may seek to disengage from as they develop a keener sense of belonging within their new communities (Marlowe et al 2013;Harris 2010).…”

Blame it on Tyra: race, refugeity and sexual representation

“…The influence of role models like supermodel Tyra Banks as both 'a comforting, maternal, Oprah-like figure' and 'the bearer of a magic ticket out of poverty' (Franklin 2005, 143) is examined indirectly through the observations of the author and two young Sudanese women who attended the pageant. As a lesbian teacher/researcher/narrator who rejects what she perceives as the media/Tyra's call to be a sexualized 'blank palette' (Franklin 2005), this author challenges -and is challenged to re-examine -the ways in which race and sexual orientation can both be Othered in hegemonic sexual and educational economies, creating feelings of 'refugeity' (Harris 2010c) in those of us who 'crisscross cultural boundaries' (Driver 2007, 155), inside and outside schools.…”

“…Ethnocinema is only now beginning to coalesce its aims and methods as a collaborative, intercultural extension of ethnographic film, the 'elder daughter of colonialism' (Rouch cited in Aufderheide 2007, 112), and move away from its origins as 'a discipline reserved to people with power interrogating people without it ' (2007, 112). There is not yet a coherent discourse on ethnocinema that seeks to interpret its practice as a tool of intercultural collaboration (Harris 2010a(Harris , 2010b(Harris , 2010c); yet its methodological emergence reflects the growing needs of an increasingly intercultural, interdisciplinary and arts-based body of performative qualitative research, particularly in education.…”