Higher Education’s Care/Control of Refugee and Displaced Students

There is growing interest in higher education’s intersections with displacement, a term used here to encompass the movement of refugees, asylum seekers, and those from otherwise forced or precarious international migration backgrounds. In particular, higher education institutions’ infrastructure and student support services are sometimes leveraged in response to displacement crises. Here, we propose a conceptual distinction between higher education’s reception and recruitment of displaced students, which share similar characteristics yet function in structurally different ways. We then consider how the modern/colonial global imaginary informs higher education’s relationship to bordering regimes and the framing of displaced students. We suggest that in addition to being problematically positioned as ‘charity’ - and, to a lesser extent, ‘cash,’ ‘competition,’ and ‘labor’ - some displaced students are also produced as ‘threats’ by bordering regimes. This highlights the importance of recognizing the ‘care/control nexus’ – that is, how care simultaneously operates as a form of control in the context of humanitarianism. We suggest the concept of ‘implicated subjects’ can help those embedded in higher education institutions move beyond overly simplistic victim/perpetrator/bystander categorizations in relation to supporting displaced students. We also offer one social cartography and two sets of hyper-self-reflexive questions as pedagogical tools to examine the imprint of a colonial system on both our higher education institutions and those of us who work within them. We suggest adopting an ongoing practice of hyper-self-reflexivity in order to respond differently to the impacts of current displacement crises and better prepare us for those to come.