Over four sessions in October, 20 academics and practitioners from around the world met virtually to discuss the question of how education can enable refugee individuals and communities to build durable futures when there is great uncertainty about where these futures will be? Recognizing the protracted nature of refugee situations, the latest UNHCR education strategy prioritizes the integration of refugees into the national education systems of host countries. While this strategy may increase refugee children and youth's access to 'inclusive and equitable quality education' (SDG4), it fails to recognize the limbo in which refugees find themselves in low- and middle-income host countries: they are non-citizens who cannot access the durable futures that education promises them.

Education and Aspirations

  1. Teleological Violence: Disjunctures between refugee aspirations and structural constraints on progress among Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia – Amanda Poole, Indiana University of Pennsylvania and Jennifer Riggan, Arcadia University (Discussant: Jo Kelcey)
  2. Refugee education for Syrians in Jordan. Disrupting, transforming or determining aspirations? – Hiba Salem, University of Cambridge (Discussant: Vidur Chopra)
  3. Hope and optimism despite small odds: understanding the aspirations for resettlement-based overseas scholarships of young people in Dadaab camps – Hassan Aden, Peace Research Institute Oslo (Discussant: Sally Bonet)

Education and Citizenship

  1. Educating beyond the nation state? insights from the Palestinian case – Jo Kelcey, Lebanese American University (Discussant: Hiba Salem)
  2. National and transnational citizenship in South Sudan and beyond – Merethe Skåras, MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society (Discussant: Sarah Dryden-Peterson)
  3. What refugee young people want their teachers to know about how their current education can help prepare them for their futures – Vidur Chopra, Sarah Dryden-Petersen, Carmen Geha, Joumana Talhouk (Discussant: Maha Shuayb)

Justice in education

  1. Decolonial pedagogies and young refugees' higher education trajectories in conflict and exile, Giorgia Dona, Afaf Jabiri, Aura Lounasmaa, Jessica Oddy, Corinne Squire, University of East London (Discussant: Amanda Poole)
  2. Quality schooling for displaced children: a global perspective informed by children from Syria (film), Eleanore Hargreaves, UCL London (Discussant: Merethe Skåras)
  3. Language for an unknowable future: language of instruction and refugee children's experiences of exile – Celia Reddick, Harvard University (Discussant: Carmen Geha)

Education for unknown futures

  1. What is the Point of School Anyway?": Refugee Youth, Resettlement Tunnel Vision, and Educational Violence. Sally Wesley Bonet, Colgate University, New York (Discussant: Hassan Aden)
  2. The political economy of refugee education in low- and middle-income countries – Shelby Carvalho & Sarah Dryden-Peterson, Harvard University (Discussant: Cindy Horst)
  3. Determinants of Refugee Children Educational Performance: A comparative study of refugees in Lebanon, Turkey and Australia – Maha Shuayb, Mohammad Hammoud, Samira Chatila, (Discussant: Eleanore Hargreaves)