“They say that we are refugees, so we are them”: The violent or life-saving act of naming?

The refugee construct is multidimensional, encompassing legal, administrative, political, and social layers. On one hand, being granted refugee status can be a matter of life or death; on the other, classifying people as refugees can be a violent act of naming as it may become a tool of categorization. Grounded in Refugee Critical Race Theory (RefugeeCrit) and informed by humanizing and arts-based methods, this qualitative study examines how four Chechen refugee-background students (RBSs) in Poland construct understandings of the term refugee . Data for this paper derive from a larger study conducted in Poland, and include semi-structured interviews, field notes, multilingual self-portraits, and I Am From poems, as well as related multimodal and multilingual artifacts. The study’s findings demonstrate that RBSs construct several understandings of the term refugee : a) refugee versus foreigner versus stranger distinction, (b) being unaware of the refugee term, (c) unquestioned internalization of the refugee term, and (d) neutral or/and positive positionality toward the refugee term. These four responses are captured in the Refugee-background Students’ Response to Refugee Term (RRR) model , which foregrounds the dynamic tensions between circulating majoritarian narratives in school and community contexts, and students’ counter-stories. The RRR model reveals the complex, fluid, and context-sensitive nature of the refugee label while centering RBSs’ perspectives as a means to amplify their agency in research. The paper advocates for refugee-centered, arts-based, humanizing, and participatory research, as well as for contextualized uses of the refugee label that enable self-positioning and foregrounding RBSs’ agency.