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Identity, boundary and schooling:perspectives on the experiences andperceptions of refugee childrenLeslie Bash aa Anglia Polytechnic University , UKPublished online: 21 Aug 2006.

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Intercultural Education,Vol. 16, No. 4, October 2005, pp. 351–366

ISSN 1467-5986 (print)/ISSN 1469-8439 (online)/05/040351–16© 2005 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14675980500303829

Identity, boundary and schooling: perspectives on the experiences and perceptions of refugee children1

Leslie Bash*Anglia Polytechnic University, UKTaylor and Francis LtdCEJI_A_130365.sgm10.1080/14675980500303829Intercultural Education1467-5986 (print)/1469-8439 (online)Original Article2005Taylor & Francis164000000October 2005LeslieBashAnglia Polytechnic UniversityFaculty of EducationBishop Hall LaneChelmsford, CM1 1SQUKl.bash@apu.ac.uk

In assuming ethnic/national identity as problematic, we examine its dynamic aspects in the contextof refugee children and their educational experiences. While the starting point of our analysis is adeconstruction of ethnic/national identity in conventional terms of language, religion, educationetc., the emerging focus is the notion of boundary. On the one hand, we look at the relevance offluid boundaries for identity formation, while on the other hand, the experience of crossing bound-aries will also be examined, particularly in the case of forced migration and displacement. Bound-aries are conceptualised in the context of a continuum in which the experiences of refugee childrenrange across school, home, locality and country. To illustrate the central arguments two case stud-ies will be highlighted: a child refugee from Kosovo, the older of two brothers arriving in the UKabout four years ago, who now attends a north London primary school; and several young minors,mainly from Kosovo, who attend a youth club in south London. Preliminary observations of thechild, together with subsequent small group discussions and semi-structured interviews, serve toidentify how the child relates to the various spaces in the school. The analysis of his drawings formsthe main part of the argument. In the case of the youth club users, observations and conversationsshow how these young people construct their individual and social identities by accessing globalresources in response to local interests.

Introduction

The experiences and perceptions of refugee children constitute the central theme ofthis paper. In this, we are confronted with past and present, order and chaos, iden-tity and its negation. When fleeing from murderous armies and militias, refugeesenter a new universe of being: without either home or job, often stripped of nationalidentity, and with only inner legacies as resources for survival. When children areinvolved and when they are orphaned, often violently, even those inner resources

*Anglia Polytechnic University, Faculty of Education, Bishop Hall Lane, Chelmsford CM1 1SQ,UK. Email: l.bash@apu.ac.uk

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may be largely absent. Attachment and loss are the dominant motifs as they struggleto find an anchor in a world where little if anything can be taken for granted. Theresults of this are almost certainly fear and apprehension. However, it is also possiblethat creativity and enhancement of the human condition may emerge from thesudden disruption of social order and the breakdown of cultural norms. This paperwill explore the tension between these two possibilities.

Western conventional wisdom in respect of child development and adult matura-tion, derived from a commonsense appreciation of the psychodynamic tradition(Freud et al.), tends to dwell upon ‘correct’ socialisation and the subsequent resolu-tion of internal conflict and tension, should the socialisation process be faulty. Apositivistic discovery of cause and effect suggests the absence of the unknowable andthus the opportunity to control and shape individual destinies. The normal, ordereduniverse will permit this to happen, but the chaotic, uncertain, possibly unknowableuniverse will not.

In focusing on the tensions occurring in the struggles for perceived acceptance in ashifting world of cultures and subcultures we also flag the internal dynamics of iden-tity. Here, we argue that space, place, time and boundary are key dimensions of theaccount of the experiences and perceptions of migrants and refugees. Moreover, arecurrent – and growing – theme is the extent to which these experiences andperceptions connect closely with perceptions of identity defined both individuallyand collectively.

Space, place, time and boundary are concepts which combine to link the physicaland social worlds and, by implication, traverse the disciplines of both the social andphysical sciences. From the complexities of post-Einsteinian theoretical physics andrecent approaches in sociology (Giddens, 1991) and geography (Harvey, 1990),through to the rather more prosaic issues concerned with the logistics of fleeing onecountry to seek refuge in another the salience of these terms becomes paramount.Following this, we draw upon the challenges posed by quantum theory to provide thebeginnings of an alternative approach to the study of refugee experience. Here, wemight invoke the ‘wave-particle’ duality as a metaphor where progress towardsexplanation of social phenomena, in addition to focusing upon relatively stablestructures must also recognise the existence of transient interacting processes. Thelatter is no less real than the former but places the emphasis on the dynamic, thussignalling, at one and the same time, the mutual exclusiveness as well as the comple-mentarity of entity and movement. To put it another way, space and time refer todistinct realities but which together constitute a complementary duality.

In employing the quantum metaphor, it is possible to transcend the conventional‘three-dimensional’ approach to social and cultural realities. More specifically, inour engagement with refugees, we propose a fourth dimension where the refugeeconnotes not just an entity which is defined in biological, psychological and socio-logical terms. The refugee is also emblematic of a dynamic characterised by intersect-ing and intertwined movements in the context of power relationships operating atlocal, national and cross national levels. Nikos Papastergiadis expressed this wellwith his metaphor of turbulence:

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Turbulence is not just a useful noun for describing the unsettling effect of an unex-pected force that alters your course of movement; it is also a metaphor for the broaderlevels of interconnection and interdependency between the various forces that are inplay in the modern world. (Papastergiadis, 2000, p. 4)

The re-definitions of commonsense constructions brought about by the paradigmaticshift of quantum theory are paralleled by the upheaval engendered by flight andexpulsion from taken-for-granted geographical, social and cultural locations. Forquantum theory ‘… throws out all Newtonian determinisms and atomisms in favourof a world made of waves and relationships, rather than a world of solid matter …’and, furthermore, speaks of ‘… local, contextual reactions to observation methodswhile at the same time recognising non-local, holistic properties that transcend timeand space, and link all elements of human, artificial, and natural space into patternsof dynamic interference …’ (Arida, 1998, p. 142 ). While such theory actually substi-tutes another kind of determinism (there is no pure causeless activity even in thequantum universe) it does suggest that it may be difficult, if not impossible, to predictbehaviour. The apparent chaos and uncertainty of the sub-atomic realm implies thepresence of unpredictability rather than the absence of determinism. ‘The turbulenceof migration is evident not only in the multiplicity of paths, but also in the unpredict-ability of the changes associated with these movements’ (Papastergiadis, 2000, p.7).

No less are the dimensions of chance, uncertainty and chaos that have an addedpiquancy in the wake of the decline of modernist grand narratives and a certain ironyin the context of an apparent resurgence of fatalistic and apocalyptic global visions.Metaphorically, the refugee is perceived to be transformed from a being with socialand cultural integrity to an atomised – or sub-atomic – entity, vulnerable to theoutcomes of warfare and political whims of governments across the world. Using thequantum metaphor it becomes apparent that the journeys taken by refugees may notbe predictable but are certainly determined by a complex interplay of macro and microsocial factors. However, fatalistic and theistic accounts will in all probability be rathermore attractive than the theoretical possibility of intricate sociological explanations.

Life is bounded

Ostensibly, physical geography offers the least contestable perspective on the notionof boundaries. The taken-for-granted assumptions of classical and early modernsocial and political theorists (Plato, Hobbes, Machiavelli, etc.) meant that societiesand states could be portrayed as distinct, coherent, relatively stable entities. The workof 19th and 20th century anthropologists likewise fed commonsense perceptions ofbounded tribal and ethnic communities, while the structural-functionalist sociologyof Talcott Parsons (Parsons, 1951) and others sought to demonstrate the systemicnature of societies and organisations, generating sets of norms and agreed valueswhich function to maintain their continuity. Thus, boundaries as commonly heldperceptions are legitimated politically and underpinned by a welter of social theory.

However even physical boundaries have become, and perhaps have always been,fluid and uncertain. The idea of a place that can be ‘created’ by its inhabitants, of

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boundaries that are implicitly made and of a ‘sense of place’ that arises from theseactivities have been elaborated and questioned by cultural geographers. Lynch(1972) and Relph (1976), for example, turned to traditionalist notions of Gemein-schaft (community) as considered in the classic work of Tonnies (1955) and of a‘sense of place’ strongly akin to the Heideggerian Dasein. More recently, criticalgeographers such as Massey have rejected such anti-modernist views and haveargued that places are processes, not single identities with unproblematic boundaries(Massey, 1993, 1997). (For a useful account of this shift, see Shurmer-Smith andHannam, 1994.) Cultural and literary critics such as Said (1978) have also engagedwith these issues in explorations of liminality and marginality. These have taken theform of studies of post-colonial and ‘world’ literatures on the one hand, and ofreviews of European and ‘Western’ literature on the other. Likewise, feministcultural and literary criticism has also turned on matters of marginality, reflected inan entire canon of published works too numerous for detailed citation in the contextof this paper.

On the other hand, we have seen that the construction of boundaries between theself and the ‘other’ is fundamental in the formation of a stable and indeed boundedidentity. Early childhood theory suggests that the development of the self is at leastpartly the outcome of a demarcation process, whereby the infant comes to a realisa-tion that his/her own biological being is distinct from that of others (notably theparent). On the other hand, further development and maturation would appear todemand that these initial boundaries are traversed, as the biological being is trans-formed into a social being with individual biological entities coming to share acommon, bounded social existence.

Psychoanalysis goes further in adopting the spatial quasi-metaphors of fragmenta-tion of the self and projection. Interesting crossovers between paediatrics andpsychoanalysis can be found in Winnicott (1951), while Shapiro and others havestudied self and boundary formation within the family (Shapiro, 1982) and in largerorganisations (Shapiro & Carr, 1991). Social psychologists, sociologists and anthro-pologists have explored the activities of group demarcation and delimitation andfound them crucial to the human experience. (For a classic example of analysis ofgroup dynamics, see Homans, 1951.)

Finally, educational researchers have analysed how spatial relationships affecteducational experiences on a micro-level (Pollard, 1985) and on a macro-level (Bashet al., 1985). Others have conceived of educational and quasi-educational settings asspaces of enclosure in which power relationships are embedded. The notion ofboundary, therefore, seems central to our experiences as human beings – and evenmore poignantly so in the case of refugees, who have crossed boundaries and ‘losttheir place in the world’ (dis-placement).

Boundaries: the constitution of finite provinces of meaning

The ‘objective’ reality of the pre-constituted universe of families and kinship groups,nation-states, tribal groups, ethnic, religious and linguistic enclaves is presumed to

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provide a firm contextual basis for individual existence. To borrow from AlfredSchutz, each may comprise a finite province of meaning where:

… there is no possibility of referring one of these provinces to the other by introducing aformula of transformation … .(Schutz, 1973, p. 230)

This tight drawing of boundaries produces multiple realities, which can only beconnected through a ‘leap’ into the unknown. The leap may imply cognitive andaffective changes of a relatively high order, possibly accompanied by significanttemporal and spatial change. Yet, for some, the connection between different reali-ties is apparently achieved through the adoption of multiple identities. Such identi-ties, according to hybridity theorists, are complex, contingent, shifting andnonsynchronous, and pertain to a de-centred and de-constructed subject.

For children the central task is to make sense of their own existence as individualsand in relation to others. Therefore, these multiple identities exist in dynamic rela-tion to each other in the context of the child, so that at one moment the childproclaims one identity, the next one another, ‘depending on who’s asking’.However, this multiplicity of identities creates a psychological, social and culturalclash, which threatens the hard-fought-for stability still in the process of being nego-tiated.

Young Kosovan refugees in London

Reflections on the themes highlighted above are relevant to our perception andthinking of the physical, cultural, social, developmental, psychological and indeededucational meanings of the term refugee. Drawing upon data derived from somelimited observations and semi-structured interviews the remainder of this paper willexplore some of these meanings with reference to two cases:

1. a 10-year-old boy from Kosovo who attends a junior school in North London;and

2. a group of adolescent refugees, mainly from Kosovo, who attend a youth club inSouth London (‘Club Delta’).

We will not examine the places where they have come from, or the borders they havecrossed, but rather concentrate on the spaces and places – intended in the richconnotation outlined above – that they inhabit now. Specifically, we will look at theactivity of making boundaries and the related one of blurring/breaking boundaries.

Demë

Demë2 arrived around five years ago from Kosovo with his mother and youngerbrother. On his arrival he was placed at an infants’ school in North London, and isnow attending the attached junior school. His experience was not totally typical, inthat most refugee families move between several placements and their children’sschooling is therefore disrupted on a regular basis. Demë was perceived as bright

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and energetic, although his performance was generally judged to be below average inmost subjects. His spoken English appeared to be very good, as was his reading, andhis listening and writing skills had been judged to have greatly improved.

In attempting to assess how Demë negotiated the task of defining himself as a boy,a pupil, and a classmate sustained weekly observations took place over a schoolterm. These showed that Demë engaged in several boundary-making activities,which might have been expected to be found in younger children. For example, heoften claimed very forcefully that it was his ‘right’ to sit on a certain chair or a certainarea of the carpet, and even ‘occupied’ other children’s places, seemingly for noother reason than to assert his dominance of the space.

However, it is to his boundary-blurring activities that we want to direct our atten-tion here, specifically to what we call camouflage strategies in his use of language andin his use and perception of space. The teachers generally judged Demë’s spokenEnglish to be highly developed and that he had no appreciable linguistic difficulties,especially in terms of reading and listening. Indeed, during the first silent observationof classroom activities, it took several minutes for the observer to identify the child,the only refugee in a class of 24, as only a vague accent could be detected. However,as the day progressed, it emerged that Demë’s linguistic skills were in fact less devel-oped than was apparent at first sight. Only a few examples will be presented here.

One of the most interesting findings emerged from the observation of Demë’sbehaviour when following instructions. Given the fact that the class teacher was anexperienced practitioner, that routines were well established and that ‘everybodyknows what they are doing’, as well as the fact that Demë has been at this school foryears, the common assumption was that Demë understood instructions, and thereforeshould ‘know what he’s doing’. The corollary is that when Demë did not followinstructions, it was because of unwillingness to do so, naughtiness or perhaps tired-ness. However, on observing Demë when he did follow instructions, it became clearthat instead of listening and understanding the teacher’s words, and acting on them,Demë carefully observed the behaviour of neighbouring pupils and imitated it. Inother words, instead of following a verbal instruction, he adopted a mimicking strategythat enabled him to ‘blend’ into the group and seemingly perform the task required.

An additional aspect of Demë’s language was his excessive and ‘inappropriate’ useof slang. Again, it was generally assumed that when he used inappropriate – not neces-sarily rude – language, Demë was choosing to impress. However, observation againshowed that Demë used colloquialisms in many instances where the above motivationsdid not apply. Furthermore, he often repeated verbatim whole sentences that he hadheard from the teacher or his peers some hours or even days later. We suggest thatDemë’s linguistic over-expression and repetitions were again mimetic strategies bywhich he, far from trying to impress, attempted to declare his membership of the group.

Even more indicative of Demë’s difficulties in negotiating his place in the schoolwas his relationship with the physical space. In his various drawings of the school,the only places that he reproduced confidently and accurately were his own class-room and the playground. Every other space, such as the dining hall, the library andthe room for ‘quiet work’ were either forgotten or misrepresented.

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These absences and misrepresentations correlate with the boundary-making activ-ities outlined above. While Demë was very forceful in establishing his dominance ofthe space in the classroom and the playground, he displayed a high level of insecuritywhen in other parts of the school. During the observer’s visits, Demë expressed hisuncertainty about the rules of the school, such as whether it was allowed to entercertain rooms or take certain routes. None of the other children observed showedthe same hesitations. On other occasions, Demë expressed exceeding puzzlementand appeared deliberately to lead the observer on a wild goose chase around theschool, all the while asking: ‘Where are we?’ and ‘Where are we going?’ It is possiblethat these were expressions of genuine confusion, but it is more probable that thesewere yet another variation of camouflage activities. In other words, these wereattempts to ‘fudge’ the issue of his confusion about the layout and rules of the schoolby exaggerating it and making it look as if, indeed, he knew where he was going, butchose to be ‘naughty’.

However, an analysis of his drawings, made in a small-group session in which thetask was to draw ‘The school’, shows a very active experience of the school as a place.

In Figure 1a Demë tells a story of a schoolboy, who goes into the toilet, makes a‘hole’ in the wall and in doing this severs the TV wires. He is now outside, and inFigure 1b we can see tanks and police cars ‘coming to get him’, and a group ofpeople with sticks, who are approaching from behind a fence to punish him forcutting the TV wires.Figure 1a. Demë’s second picture of ‘The school’Figure 1b. Demë’s third picture of ‘The school’In these drawings, the school is used as a stage to tell an unrelated story. Theconceptual boundaries between what pertains to the school, and would therefore beappropriate to the task at hand, and what pertains to the ‘outside world’ are ignored.Also, the physical boundaries between inside and outside are broken and havebecome very fluid, as the layout and graphic devices, which resemble those found invideo games, show. The boy can actively break the boundaries by making a hole inthe wall. It is significant, though, that in the second drawing the hole has disap-peared and in its place there are drain covers. These will make it possible for the boyto re-enter the school, where, hopefully, he will be safe from the attackers.

The interface between inside and outside is problematic in several of Demë’sdrawings. Figure 2 shows a portion of a drawing in which Demë was asked to drawhis favourite place in the school. The picture illustrates the classroom, rather accu-rately depicted, and the playground. The following excerpt from the session tran-scripts explains what the objects on the left are.

Researcher: So this is your favourite place in the school … Is this Class 7?Demë: Yes. (…) and this is the playground.R: (pointing at cloud-shaped object on the mid-left) And what is this?D: It’s to hide, it’s where people can hide.R: Ah. And who hides in there?D: People, you know.R: Do you ever hide there? You play hide and seek with your friends?D: Nooo, other people, not me. It’s outside, like … They don’t want to be found out. …uh, they look in and hide. Here (pointing at potato-shaped object on bottom left-handcorner). They watch. They. There.

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Figure 1a. Demë’s second picture of ‘The school’

Figure 1b. Demë’s third picture of ‘The school’

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Figure 2. Demë’s picture of ‘My favourite place in the school’ (partial)Figure 3. Demë’s first picture of ‘The school’This was as much as was forthcoming as to the identity of the ‘people who watch’.Interestingly, the theme of watching and being watched appeared in Demë’s veryfirst drawing of ‘The school’.

When asked what the triangular object in the top left-hand corner was, Demëreplied it was a video camera ‘to watch them’. We will not enter here into the inter-pretative and ethical quagmire that this picture presents to the researcher. We willonly note that again the school was used as a pretext to tell a story, which obviouslyhad much more urgency and poignancy than the task at hand.

In both examples, however, it was possible to detect a fundamental anxiety aboutthe possibility of being watched from the outside. Parallel to an imaginary/desiredability to ‘break out’ of the school at will, runs the theme of the possibility of people‘breaking in’, with the associated sinister connotations of danger and insecurity. Onthe one hand, then, the school is a ‘space of enclosure’ in a quasi-Foucaldian sense,a space that confines, regulates and ultimately oppresses. On the other hand, it is aspace that is ‘not closed enough’, a place that does not offer enough protection, andultimately a place where Demë does not seem to feel as safe as he could and should.In more ways than one, Demë is ‘neither here nor there’.

Club Delta

Club Delta3 is a council-funded youth club in south London. There is a weeklyevening session open to refugees; attended by around 20 young people with an aver-age of eight to ten at any one time. The club users are mainly unaccompanied

Figure 2. Demë’s picture of ‘My favourite place in the school’ (partial)

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minors (14 to 17 years of age)1 who arrived from Kosovo between five and sevenyears ago. Their legal status is varied, and not all of them have been granted refugeestatus. Their care arrangements range from a place in a children’s home, to fosterparents, to independent living; a few have been placed in bed and breakfast accom-modation. ‘Being neither here nor there’ is again a fitting description of where theseyoung people are. There is an obvious sense in which all refugees find themselves ina ‘limbo’ for a time – at least until their legal status is decided. Sometimes the uncer-tainty is longer-lived, as in many cases young people are allowed to stay in the coun-try until they are 18, and are then deported back to their country of origin. However,we maintain that being in a ‘limbo’ has richer meanings and deeper implicationsthan just being unsure of one’s legal right to remain in a foreign country.

In fact, the experience of transition is central to all these young people’s lives,beyond their legal status. Both those who have been granted indefinite leave toremain and thus are sure of their physical location, and even more so those whohave not, still need to solve the dilemma of their psychological positioning (Figure4). In other words, these young people need to negotiate their identity not only interms of where they are now, but also of where they have come from and of wherethey want to be. In short, they need to decide where to position themselves in thediagram:Figure 4. Psychological positioningAnother obvious transition these young people are facing is indeed adolescence,and while it is accepted that this has a socially constructed character, it is commonlyviewed as a significant psychobiological phase in human development (Valentine,2003). The passage from childhood to adulthood is conventionally perceived as

Figure 3. Demë’s first picture of ‘The school’

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problematic and often dominated by emotional upheaval. In the case of these youngrefugees, it is also fraught with bureaucratic and material difficulties. English lawstates that anyone over the age of 16 is deemed to be capable of living indepen-dently, which means that often these young people are taken away from their fosterplacement and are allocated a room in shared accommodation or in bed and break-fast accommodation. In other respects, however, they are still considered minorsuntil 18, the age at which all state benefits they have received as ‘young people’ arewithdrawn. As already mentioned, the eighteenth birthday can indeed also meandeportation. Incidentally, asylum-seekers whose cases have not been decided haveno right to work. Since gainful employment is one of the markers of successful adult-hood, it is easy to see how an already fraught process of transition can become aquandary when these young people negotiate their positioning in the diagram(Figure 5).Figure 5. TransitionWe take inspiration for the use of Venn diagrams from (Phinney and Devich-Navarro, 1997) work on ethnic minority adolescents in the US in which African-American and Mexican-American young people were asked to describe themselveswith reference to their cultural belonging.

The resulting model, reproduced in Figure 6, shows how the participants viewedthe ethnic and the American culture in turn as separated, combined or overlapping,and their own relative positioning. Considering the fact that our research at ClubDelta is in its initial stages, it would be precipitate to analyse the data gathered so farin the light of Phinney and Devich-Navarro’s model. However, from our initial

Figure 4. Psychological positioning

Figure 5. Transition

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observations, it is already possible to sketch some interesting comments about theethnic and national identity of the participants in the group. We will not commenton the religious factors involved, as this will be looked into later in the research.Figure 6. Identification patterns based on the individual’s perception of American and Ethnic cultures, and his/her position relative to each culture (represented by ‘X’)According to Phinney and Devich-Navarro’s (1997) model, it would be reason-able to expect the young users of Club Delta to see themselves as belonging to oneor both of the Kosovan-Albanian and English cultures, according to one of the iden-tified patterns. Yet, the Kosovan-Albanian identity is barely visible in these youngpeople, and only surfaces when probing questions are asked in long and informalconversation. The reasons for this will be looked into later in the research. For themoment we will concentrate instead on the overt identification patterns that we wereable to observe readily. Before we discuss these, however, it will be useful to outlinebriefly the general social landscape of the south London area where these youngpeople live. The borough has a high rate of unemployment, social housing, ethnicminority groups, and a reducing, but still significant incidence, of street crime. Ahigh percentage of the residents are of Afro-Caribbean descent.

A striking characteristic of the Club users’ intra-group language is their adoptionof cadences and vocabulary of a specific form of ‘black’ English. This happens evenin situations when one might expect them to use Albanian, such as when three

Figure 6. Identification patterns based on the individual’s perception of American and Ethnic cultures, and his/her position relative to each culture (represented by ‘X’)

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Kosovars are speaking exclusively to each other in their little group. The linguistic‘blackness’ is sometimes so over-expressed that it almost has farcical effects. Adopt-ing again a Venn diagram to summarise, it seems that these young people areengaged in negotiating their positioning between blackness and whiteness (Figure7).Figure 7. NegotiationHowever, the characteristics of this ‘black’ English are not those of the ‘WestIndian’, Afro-Caribbean English prevalently spoken by adolescents in the boroughand across London. Instead, the club users speak their own version of Black-Ameri-can English. We identified two possible and concurrent determinants of this some-what unexpected identification pattern. The group is very cohesive both within theclub and outside it, although the group members do not all attend the same schoolor live very close to each other. This is partly explained by the fact that attacks onrefugee young people are not uncommon in the area (‘safety in numbers’). Thegroup, then, has formed a strong identity, which expresses itself through ‘blackness’,and is at the same time distinct from the other ‘black gangs’ with which the groupcomes into contact and confrontation on a daily basis. This Black-American iden-tity, then, serves a ‘local’ purpose, in that it affords the group an identifiablecommon language, as well as the means to distinguish itself from other local groups.The model, however, does not have local origins. It is accessed through the media,notably the Internet and to a certain extent television. The inspiration is mostlyprovided by ‘Gangsta Rap’ websites and videos, and by what has been called ‘bling-bling’ culture. In other words, the group blackness has a global inspiration, whichbypasses the notion of locality and of nationality to extend into the realms of virtualreality.

Conclusion

These preliminary observations have brought us to consider identity formation inchild and adolescent refugees as a function of both locally perceived needs and ofglobal interests. Regarding the experiences of adolescents, further research takes usin two main directions. On the one hand, we analyse in detail the way in which

Figure 7. Negotiation

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specific on-line and televisual sources are used to construct the group’s identity, andhow the ‘private’, intra-group talk relates to the ‘public’ discourse the group adoptsto present itself to the ‘outside’. On the other hand, we examine how the group’sprivate/public dynamics play a part in the individual’s identity formation, and howthey can encourage the construction of what have been termed ‘chameleon identi-ties’. We interpret these types of social and individual constructions as mediated iden-tities, which, through the interface between local purposes and global influences,become what may be viewed as glocal identities. We believe that such notions willbecome central to sociological, psychological, anthropological and ultimately educa-tional analyses of how humans construct their individual and group identities in the21st century.

With this, we return to the notion of border as a key into identity formation. Expo-nents of hybridity discourses have highlighted how the ‘in-between’ space, the limi-nal ‘third space’ of translation as the place where identity, meaning and culture areformed (Bhabha, 1994). Such diverse writers as postcolonial social anthropologists,economic sociologists and educationalists have described this phenomenon in termsof ‘border crossing’ – see for example Giroux (1992), Di Leonardo (1994) andGarcia Canclini (1995). As Ulf Hannerz observes:

… [t]his is not a ‘borderless world’; the point is rather that borders are not absolutebarriers, but that they become significant social, cultural, political, economic and legalfacts in the way they are crossed … To deal with globalization is to deal with diversityunder increasing interconnectedness. (Hannerz, 1999, p. 326)

A postmodern, supermarket notion of multiple identities predicated on consumerist‘choice’, where children might be seen as relatively passive recipients, will notsuffice. In re-engaging with the quantum metaphor, it may be important to stressonce more the uncertainty that arises from the dialectic of cultural encounter while,at the same time, signalling the liberating potential of ‘individuation and self-creation’ in identity formation (see Caro & Murphy, 2002). We therefore suggestthat a major responsibility of educators is to facilitate children to act as managers oftheir own, many sided, frequently fluid, identities in their search for culturalanchors. Educators might be cautioned against the use of children for purposes ofwhat may be seen as social engineering, especially refugee children surrounded byfear and uncertainty. At the same time, our preliminary observations signal acts ofresilience on the part of these case study refugee children – and resilience may be akey factor in the promotion and reinforcement of emergent identities.

Notes

1. This article is based on a paper presented at the CESE conference in Copenhagen, June 2004.2. To ensure anonymity, some personal and place names have been changed.3. The Club users sign in every time they use the club. They have to declare their age on the

form, but this, or indeed their name, is not checked. There are several reasons why theseyoung people might want to conceal their real age and name, reasons we will not be able todiscuss here. In this study, we accepted the declared age as a starting point, and assumed that,

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Experiences and perceptions of refugee children 365

while some of the participants might be one or two years older than their declared age, mostparticipants are still teenagers (up to 19 years old).

Notes on contributor

Leslie Bash teaches sociology and is director of the professional doctorate in educa-tion at Anglia Polytechnic University (UK). His current research interests arefocused on conflict and tension in an exploration of changing collective identi-ties – and challenges for intercultural education.

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