Violence worldwide has prompted forced migration on an unprecedented scale, creating complex challenges for education, particularly in the Global South, where most of the world’s refugees reside. The widespread endorsement of education as a universal human right has given rise to a burgeoning field of global engagement in education to meet the needs of refugee learners. However, growing attention to longstanding issues linked to racism and coloniality in humanitarian assistance has impelled important conversations in recent years. This talk offers insights into the near-absent attention to structural racism and White supremacy in global education circles—meaning spaces of global governance, policymaking, and advocacy in international education development and humanitarian response. Drawing on over a decade of research on Syria refugee education, the talk engages in timely conversations about power inequities in humanitarianism and explores the notion of “ordinary solidarities” as an anticolonial mandate for rights-based humanitarian interventions. Intertwining humanitarian discourse and one school’s practices, the talk considers implications for ongoing efforts to reconfigure humanitarian relations and structures, and our own roles in forging reparative futures.
Speaker
PROFESSOR ZEENA ZAKHARIA
Zeena Zakharia is Assistant Professor of International Education Policy at the University of Maryland at College Park. Her research examines education and peacebuilding in contexts of conflict and advances a critical approach to refugee studies in the Middle East. These interests stem from over two decades of educational research, teaching, and school leadership in war-affected contexts. She was a Tueni Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a Middle Eastern Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University.
