Education Refugees and the Spatial Politics of Childhood Vulnerability

This paper examines the practices of Southern Sudanese children who obtained an education in refugee camps abroad and subsequently returned to their communities during many decades of civil war, and how these practices influence and are influenced by educational interventions mobilized by international institutions intended to protect displaced children and regulate their movement. Education has only recently become a standard tool among these interventions, but has for a long time been a motivating factor in the movement of people around the globe. This meeting of historically and politically conditioned practices of movement with new international policy responses to displacement crises raises questions about distinctions that are made between voluntary and involuntary movement, between the various socio‐cultural and economic conditions that give rise to child migration, and how we define home and vulnerability in a milieu of global interconnectedness and interdependence. Identifying both junctures and dis‐junctures between the uses of education by child refugees and the international institutions that provide it, the author proposes a research agenda on the education refugee to better understand the development and consequences of education policy in emergency and post‐conflict situations.