“I Already Know This:” Knowledge, Agency and Self-Definition Among Refugee-Background Youth

This work highlights the ways refugee-background newcomer youth and families enact agency and engender self-definition spaces and practices. This focus elevates their experience and shifts away from deficit-based perspectives in popular discourses, in order to equip educators for teaching and engaging that are equitable, culturally-sustaining and dignity-conferring. I build on scholarship that centers the knowledge and ways of being of newcomers–including perspectives from critical refugee studies–and include findings from my ethnographic work in educational and community spaces of refugee background youth. I argue for foregrounding newcomers’ self-definition processes, which are on-going and formative, and are employed not only for adaptation to the new context of reception, but also as ways to resist confining or dehumanizing labels and narratives.