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African Refugees in Australia: Social Position and Educational Outcomes
Abstract
National equity policy debates in education are often driven by issues of disadvantage, opportunity, and achievement. However, little is known about how a disadvantaged position mediates people’s ability to transform opportunities into valuable achievements. Using African refugees in Australia as an empirical case, and drawing on a mixed method of research, this paper aims to address this knowledge gap. The main sources of data were policy documents, population census reports, and national higher education statistics. The findings highlight limitations with existing higher education equity policies in Australia and the extent to which African refugees have benefited from generic equity programs. In making sense of the data, the paper develops a new conceptual model by innovatively synthesizing the capability approach to social justice and a theory of social reproduction. The model offers an analytical lens to understand the dialectical interplay between objective contexts and subjective conditions that mediate substantive opportunity, conversion ability, and educational choice of the refugee youth.
... In the same vein, Lenette et al. (2019) indicate that the Australian government intentionally proposes policies to close pathways to higher education for refugees by making it difficult for them to attain the necessary proficiency in English. A mixed-methods study from Australia has found that refugees, particularly those from Africa, are quite underrepresented in higher education for various reasons, some of which are structural in nature (Molla, 2021). For example, there is a lack of recognition of refugees from certain areas as more disadvantaged; recognising this could enable policymakers and other actors to devise relevant policies to alleviate challenges faced by such refugees. ...
... These restrictive policies negatively influence initiatives aimed at refugee inclusion in higher education in Austria (Bacher et al., 2020). Molla (2021) notes that there is reluctance on the part of the authorities in some destination countries, such as Australia, to fight 'structural unfreedoms such as racial vilification of Black Africans in the public sphere' (p. 345, italics in original). ...
... 345, italics in original). Molla (2021) and other researchers (e.g., Stewart and Mulvey, 2014) argue that such negative experiences may impede the educational attainment of refugee youth by exposing them to stress and feelings of powerlessness. ...
The number of forcibly displaced people, including refugees, has been
increasing exponentially over the last few decades. Refugees settled in Western
destination countries face several challenges in successfully accessing and
participating in higher education and in becoming knowledge producers. This
is in sharp contrast to uncritical assumptions that refugees settled in these
countries are better off in terms of pursing higher education. To shed more light
on this issue, I aim to address the research question ‘How does the integration
process in a Western destination country contribute to the exclusion of refugees
from knowledge production?’ The article uses an education pipeline analogy
and human agency theory as the theoretical framework. I conduct narrative
interviews with six refugees who planned to pursue higher education but could
not realize their plans in Norway. The findings indicate that the refugee education
pipeline is broken and stuffed with various restrictive factors that weaken the
refugees’ agency to make informed decisions. These factors included a long
waiting time for settlement, withholding relevant information about higher
education, demotivating and misplaced advice about higher education and
language training programmes for non-academic purposes. The article ends
with a conclusion and several implications.
... Black African refugees in Australia mainly came from eight sub-Saharan countries: Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, and South Sudan. Refugee-background Africans are often socially and academically disengaged (Molla, 2020a;Victorian Government, 2018d). Here, the term refugee background broadly refers to students who, and/or whose parents, arrived in Australia on humanitarian visas. ...
... Low educational capital at home represents a significant disadvantage. Refugee-background African students are educationally disadvantaged partly because, unlike their peers from dominant social groups, the values they receive at home may not be congruent with school practices and expectations (Molla, 2019(Molla, , 2020a. As a result, they may not develop a "feel for the game" (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 9) of academic engagement. ...
... African parents are often "headstrong about the career paths the young person should take" (Victorian Government, 2018d, p. 51). However, there is often a significant gap between parental expectations and student academic engagement and outcome (Molla, 2020a). When parents come to realize that their children are unable to meet their expectations or when the children reject the imposed aspirations, the outcome is discord at home and disengagement at school. ...
For young people, the end of secondary school represents a critical transition point. This article aims at understanding how schools support a particular group of disadvantaged students to transition into education, training, or employment. Drawing on a life-course perspective and with refugee-background African students as an empirical focus, this qualitative case study documents career support practices in nine government schools in the State of Victoria. The findings show that schools provide transition opportunities that support African students to envision their post-school educational and career trajectories. The arrangements include career planning, alternative pathways, and employment of community engagement officers. However, there are persisting challenges that impede this group of students from fully benefiting from these arrangements. The main barriers identified here are academic disengagement, doxic aspirations, misconceptions about qualifications, and low self-efficacy. The article also argues that the persistence of these challenges is attributable at least in part to such overlooked factors of engagement as institutional practices, student agency, and home environment.
... A durable marginal position further circumscribes their access to social rights and opportunities, leading to the reproduction of disadvantage in society. Refugees continue to face lingering challenges in the areas of educational attainment, employment, cultural adaptation, and social engagement (Molla 2020a). Disrupted educational trajectories and diminished social networks mean that refugees lack strong 'navigational capacity' (Appadurai 2013) to explore existing opportunities. ...
... Educational attainment is both a marker and a means of refugee integration (Strang and Ager 2010). However, in Australia and globally, refugees have limited level of higher education (HE) participation (Earnest et al. 2010;Ferede 2018;Naidoo et al. 2018;Stevenson and Baker 2018;Molla 2019Molla , 2020aNaylor et al. 2019;Unangst 2019;Jungblut, Vukasovic, and Steinhardt 2020). The United Nations Refugee Agency specifically noted that even though young people (aged between 18 and 24 years) account for a significant portion of the refugee population, as of late 2018, only 3 in 100 refugee youth were enrolled in HE. ...
... For instance, notwithstanding institutional equity arrangements (see the next section), HE participation and completion rates of African refugee youth remain very low. Data obtained from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that, on average, over 85% of young people from the main countries of origin of African refugees who settled in Australia had no university degree and did not attend HE within five years of their arrival (Molla 2020a). The trend has not changed much since the mid-1990s. ...
Measured in per capita terms, Australia has one of the most generous refugee resettlement programs in the world. This paper investigates the extent to which refugee status is recognized as a category of disadvantage in Australian higher education. Drawing on a scalar view of policy work and Fraser’s notion of misframing, the paper assesses the policy visibility of humanitarian entrants. It compares sectoral equity provisions with national and institutional arrangements that target refugees. The findings reveal scalar misalignments. That is, although national educational and multicultural initiatives recognize refugee status as a category of disadvantage, refugees remain hidden from the sectoral policy view. However, in translating sectoral policies, many universities have managed to maintain a balance between compliant enactment of equity strategies and responsive adjustment of equity targets. The paper also highlights instances of policy misframing – equity provisions that target refugees are characterized by issue omissions and deficit accounts. It is further argued that the convergence of scalar misalignment and policy misframing constitutes a structural factor of disadvantage that inhibits higher education participation of refugees. For Australia to fully integrate humanitarian entrants, there is an urgent need for a streamlined policy response to the educational needs and aspirations of the group.
... However, in Australia, integration outcomes of refugees are often conceived in terms of labour market participation. Refugee resettlement and integration programs and services focus on the newcomers' ability to speak English and secure jobs (Molla 2021a;Australian Government 2019;Shergold et al. 2019). This narrow framing does not recognise social interactions and political discourses that promote or undermine refugees'wellbeing. ...
... It necessarily entails stigmatising a difference to put people in a hierarchical order. In Australia, by framing youth violence as an ethnocultural problem, those who propagate Afrophobia represent Africans as inherently violent and dangerous (Molla 2021a(Molla , 2021c(Molla , 2023. They create an 'interior frontier' that divides what they see as desirables and undesirables. ...
Racialised and culturally distinct refugee groups increasingly face hostilities and negative representations in countries of resettlment. The experience of African refugee youth in Australia illustrates this general trend. This paper explores how racial Othering discourse seriously undermines the group’s wellbeing. The article concentrates in particular on two aspects of relational wellbeing, the capacity to move in public without fear or shame and the ability to feel a sense of belonging to the place where one lives in. Theoretically, the paper draws together work on wellbeing from a capability approach and relational perspective with interdisciplinary literature on racial Othering. Empirically, the paper demonstrates the pervasive culture of racial Othering through media identifications of African youth with criminality and gang violence and illustrates impacts on young people’s wellbeing through data from interviews with African refugee youth. The youth’s accounts show how it feels to be a problem and what it means not to belong.
... The academic literature on the issues surrounding refugee access to HE in Europe, Australia and the United States notes that individual characteristics as well as contextual elements affect refugees' transition to HE in their host countries (Delgado, 2012;De Haene et al., 2018;Unangst, 2019;Molla, 2021a). Among other things, these studies identify the lack of institutional support (Molla, 2021a), racial bias, discrimination and inequality (Halse, 2017;Kubota, 2020), early disadvantages and experiences of trauma and isolation (Molla, 2020(Molla, , 2021b as factors affecting refugees' access to HE in the host countries. ...
Higher education for young people, including marginalised groups, is essential for equitable and sustainable development. There is limited research on refugees’ access to higher education, especially in developing countries. This article contributes to the literature on refugee education by raising awareness of the demand for education and issues surrounding refugees’ access to higher education in West and Central Africa (WCA). We consider changes in the population of young refugees as a proxy for shifts in their demand for education and map available opportunities and challenges. Our analysis of refugee youth demographic data indicates increasing trends in most WCA countries, signalling rapidly growing demand for (higher) education by refugees in their countries of asylum. Mapping these countries’ provision of refugee education opportunities and dedicated scholarship programmes for refugees, as well as interviews with refugee students promotes understanding of the conditions and challenges they confront in the transition to higher education in their host countries. The article highlights the urgency of the refugee situation in Africa and calls for immediate and practical action to facilitate and support refugees’ access to tertiary education.
... As other researchers have identified, caring for recently arrived refugee-background 'learners not only involves professional knowledge and detailed planning, but is intimately linked to attentiveness, experimentation and sensing learners' needs' (Børsch et al., 2023, p. 2). Learning about the capabilities (Molla, 2021a), everyday realities and histories of each individual refugee-background student strongly positions teachers and school staff to work with and support these students in a way that will support positive wellbeing and educational outcomes. ...
Previous research has established that young people from refugee backgrounds may have experienced loss and trauma prior to coming to Australia, may experience
ongoing racism and discrimination in their host country, and may struggle to adapt to a new and sometimes unfamiliar culture (Arnot & Pinson, 2005; Baak, 2019;
Baak et al., 2020; Bennouna et al., 2021; Bešić et al., 2020; Block et al., 2014; Cooc & Kim, 2023; Correa-Velez et al., 2016; de Wal Pastoor, 2016; Dryden-Peterson et al., 2019; Due & Riggs, 2009; Keddie, 2012; Koyama & Kasper, 2021; McIntyre & Hall, 2020). Students from refugee backgrounds may also require additional learning support to engage with the Australian education system due to limited English language capabilities, missed or interrupted schooling, and unfamiliarity with Western curricula and schooling approaches (Brown et al., 2006; Woods, 2009).
For these reasons, previous research has examined how schools can best support students from refugee backgrounds (see Miller et al., 2018; Baak et al., 2019).
In a previous report (Baak et al., 2021), we described the outcomes of the second stage of the Refugee Student Resilience Study, which identified six key domains of
current best practice in refugee education from the perspectives of 50 school leaders and teachers. In this second report, we privilege the perspectives and voices of students from refugee backgrounds on the school-level relationships, activities and services that enable them to develop resilience despite their sometimes challenging life experiences as young refugees. The report also
gives voice to their concerns about cultural issues and educational arrangements that impede their positive development as emerging citizens of an increasingly
diverse Australia.
... Domination can manifest in direct violent attacks or subtle effects, such as internalising external negative representations. In Australia, as shown elsewhere (Molla 2021a(Molla , 2021b(Molla , 2021c(Molla , 2023b, Black African migrants in Australia are deeply racialized and Othered in that they are primarily defined by the colour of their skin and young people in the community are framed as dangerous and undesirable. The ensuing discussion will delve into the nuanced intricacies of racial Othering, shedding light on its manifestations and repercussions in contemporary societies. ...
With the rise of excessive nationalism in traditionally liberal democratic societies, those identified as ethnoculturally ‘Other’ are often seen as threats to national values and security. Responding to racial Othering requires clarity about the problem and its structural roots. The first section of this paper defines racial Othering. The second section presents the historical, politico-economic, socio-cultural, and psycho-cognitive roots of racial Othering. The third section of the paper names examples of anti-racist responses to racism from below. It calls for demystifying the social origins of racial categories, challenging wilful ignorance of racism, and discomforting discriminatory dispositions. In closing, the paper reiterates the key points, argues why anti-racist movements need to be galvanised, and cautions against an inflated use of racism in such activities.
... Simultaneously, they also contain the freedom to acquire essential skills such as reading, writing, and numeracy, participate in political processes, and more. These substantive freedoms manifest as a result of possessing feasible capabilities (Molla, 2021). In Sen's framework, there are five vital instrumental freedoms, each of which is critical in broadening an individual's capabilities. ...
China’s persistent battle against poverty has evolved through comprehensive strategies to build a more equitable society. This study examines the nuanced challenges faced by policy-excluded groups and individuals on the verge of poverty and sheds light on the unintended consequences of existing anti-poverty policies. Drawing on Amartya Sen’s capability approach, the study highlights the critical role of instrumental freedoms in poverty alleviation, emphasizing the need to move beyond traditional income-based measurements. The analysis reveals that policy marginalization is intricately linked to policy design, resulting in the exclusion of distinct population segments. By adopting a multi-dimensional perspective encompassing health, education, and overall human capabilities, the study uncovers a substantial proportion of excluded households experiencing multi-dimensional poverty. The findings underscore the limitations of solely assessing poverty through income levels, urging policymakers to consider these dimensions holistically. Furthermore, the study provides valuable insights for policy formulation and management. It calls for a critical examination of public policies to mitigate their exclusionary effects, particularly in vital anti-poverty systems. Emphasizing the interdependence of economic conditions, social opportunities, political freedoms, protective security, and transparency guarantees, the study advocates for policies that address these dimensions collectively, recognizing their integral role in creating equal social opportunities and developing instrumental freedoms. Overall, this research enriches our understanding of poverty and policy marginalization, offering a theoretical foundation and practical implications for the development and implementation of more inclusive and effective anti-poverty strategies.
... As such, refugees' access to education services and opportunities is hindered by structural, procedural, socio-cultural or political factors (Molla, 2021) In countries of settlement, refugees who have engaged in HE are more likely to find work and contribute to the local economy (Cantat, 2022). Nevertheless, the opening of national HE spaces for refugees in Africa is a complex matter with multiple constraints that demand intervention by both national and international agencies. ...
An intricate mesh of factors hampers students from refugee backgrounds from accessing and having success in higher education (HE). The paper examines HE within a broader framework of refugee education and the future politics of its provision. Much research is done on refugee children and youth in schooling contexts, but less is known about students from refugee backgrounds in HE. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), an estimated 65 million people are currently displaced, of whom over 21 million meet refugee status criteria. Nevertheless, only five percent of this group has access to HE. Thus, access to HE and the success of students from refugee backgrounds are central to the discussion on the future of HE. The paper provides a comparative overview of difficulties regarding access to HE for refugee students in Uganda and Ethiopia, highlighting policy and settlement issues in their legislative and political contexts. It also interrogates students’ coping mechanisms, exploring their experiences through interviews. The study uses secondary data, document analysis, and interviews with a total of 30 students from refugee backgrounds, fifteen from Makerere University in Uganda and fifteen from Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia.
... Conversely, in contexts where such attributes are missing or limited, academic disengagement is expected to be a serious issue. Pre-pandemic research shows that migrant families, particularly those from African countries, had limited school engagement (Molla, 2021(Molla, , 2022. The pandemic has amplified the problem. ...
The COVID-19 pandemic caused significant educational disruption globally. When the pandemic forced schools to switch to emergency home-schooling, parental engagement in education became more critical. Some parents found home-schooling as an opportunity to form stronger relationships with their children. Others acquired an enhanced insight into their children’s schoolwork. However, the emerging literature shows that, as not all parents were equally positioned to support their children’s learning at home, emergency home-schooling has resulted in a significant learning loss. Guided by the concept of capital interaction, this article reports on a qualitative case study that investigated the experiences of 20 migrant parents in Victoria, Australia. A thematic analysis of the data reveals challenges associated with parental self-efficacy, financial hardship, language and technological barriers, time constraints, and disengagement and exhaustion. Remote learning may return in the future, and we must prepare for such disruption by improving equitable access to education delivered online and at home. To this end, the paper outlines some policy ideas.
... Many other negative conversion factors have been identified, including a sense of social exclusion (e.g., Pym, 2017;Tamim, 2021) and lack of "navigational capacity" (Cin & Doğan, 2021). In Australia, Molla (2019Molla ( , 2020aMolla ( , 2020b found that many refugee-background African youth were unable to navigate the HE system, which he attributed to life experiences such as "war trauma, disrupted educational pathways, low parental educational attainment, negative stereotypes, racial discrimination, financial hardship and language barriers" (2019, p. 8). He found that these were compounded intersectionally, resulting in corrosive disadvantage. ...
There are almost 90 million forced migrants globally, many of whom could benefit from online higher education; yet evidence suggests extremely low retention rates of displaced people in online learning. Since retention is often seen as being linked to engagement, this study aimed to understand the nature of student engagement by displaced learners in online higher education (HE) and to identify practical ways in which higher education institutions (HEIs) can support displaced learners to engage in online learning. The methodology included both empirical and theoretical components. The empirical study focused on a qualitative analysis of the lived experiences of ten online Sanctuary Scholars enrolled on an online master’s degree with a UK university. The theoretical analysis involved integrating concepts related to online engagement from the HE literature with those from the Capability Approach. A thematic analysis of the empirical data found that, while conversion factors such as trauma and “lifeload” presented obstacles for all the Sanctuary Scholars, some graduated, whereas others withdrew from the programme without completing it. The findings point to a nuanced web of interactions between resources, enablers and constraints (positive and negative conversion factors), capabilities, engagement and personal agency for each research participant. The original contribution of this thesis is that it proposes a Capabilitarian Online Engagement Model, which shows how engagement along four dimensions is underpinned by specific capabilities; it also illustrates how engagement fuels the capability for further engagement and highlights the role of student agency. The study contributes to theoretical understanding of displaced learners’ engagement in online learning, while practically, it offers insights to HEIs for fostering online engagement. Socially, the thesis adds to the growing body of open research in the social sciences.
... As such, refugees' access to education services and opportunities is hindered by structural, procedural, socio-cultural or political factors (Molla, 2021) In countries of settlement, refugees who have engaged in HE are more likely to find work and contribute to the local economy (Cantat, 2022). Nevertheless, the opening of national HE spaces for refugees in Africa is a complex matter with multiple constraints that demand intervention by both national and international agencies. ...
An intricate mesh of factors hampers students from refugee backgrounds from accessing and having success in higher education (HE). The paper examines HE within a broader framework of refugee education and the future politics of its provision. Much research is done on refugee children and youth in schooling contexts, but less is known about students from refugee backgrounds in HE. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
... Similarly, while the German system has been lauded for its comparatively robust investment in refugee education, persistent service gaps remain: public university webpages aimed at displaced learners are predominantly in German only (rather than offering parallel content in Arabic, Pashto, etc.) and largely center cis-gender men (Unangst, 2020). Relevant calls for policy attention to the intersectional identities of displaced youth have begun to appear across the nationally-focused literatures and in comparative work alike (e.g., Moffit et al., 2020;Molla, 2020;Kuzhabekova & Nardon, 2021): Fincham (2022) has referred to the need to counteract a "depoliticization of refugee identities through humanitarianism" (p. 318) or a tendency to prioritize the displaced identity above all other salient identities. ...
According to UNHCR (2023), 6% of refugees currently access higher
education worldwide. In light of this pressing equity crisis, it is important to understand the policies currently in place to support displaced learners across national and regional landscapes. Using Critical Policy Analysis (CPA) and applying an intersectional lens, this paper analyzes a single US state context, Ohio, and finds a pervasive policy silence identified by policy actors based at colleges and
universities. This policy gap spans federal, state, and institutional levels, consistent with nascent literature on the US policy context (Luu & Blanco, 2021; Unangst et al. 2022). Our discussion focuses on higher education access policies, pointing to a lack of consistency in the language used by both policy and policy actors around displaced students. Further, we address the implications of “incidental” policy
and programmatic support being provided to displaced students via established student service infrastructures rather than targeted or intentional support. We also explore how external funders do and may influence the development of policy centering displaced learners.
This chapter outlines the profound implications of Racial Othering on students with a refugee background, specifically centring on the experiences of African heritage youth. Drawing on the capability approach as an analytical framework, the chapter illustrates the pervasive nature of racial Othering by illuminating its role in propagating low teacher expectations, eroding student self-efficacy, fostering toxic stress, and inducing unhealthy or negative coping mechanisms. The key message is that providing equitable refugee education goes beyond widening access. Substantive equity provisions necessitate the removal of unfreedoms that impede individuals' ability to fully derive benefits from educational opportunities. In keeping with this perspective, the chapter underscores the imperative need to cultivate racially and culturally safe learning environments. Such environments not only acknowledge the multifaceted impact of racial Othering but actively work towards dismantling it, thereby enabling refugee students to convert their educational opportunities into meaningful and valued outcomes.
Migrants have played a crucial role in shaping the history of Australian society and its development, particularly after 1975, when Australia formally dismantled its White Australia Policy and welcomed immigrants from around the world. Since then, millions of immigrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds have settled in Australia. This review aims to critically discuss the main challenges that many of these immigrants face as part of their integration process in Australia. For this research, various large and relevant databases were considered and searched. And by applying ‘inclusion and exclusion criteria’, fifty-six major articles published between 1975 to 2021 were selected for critical review and analysis. The findings of this research indicate that, while there have been changes to streamline the process of integration and improve services, five clusters of major challenges have confronted immigrants since 1975: the labour market, racism and discrimination, the language barrier, social connections and housing and accommodation.
With the global increase in forcibly displaced populations, understanding and improving educational opportunities and outcomes for refugee youth is of paramount importance. This scoping review focuses on understanding the extent and nature of evidence related to school engagement among refugee parents and students. The review’s scope was limited to peer-reviewed articles published in English between 2015 and 2023. The review reveals insights into research contexts, methodological and theoretical approaches, empirical interests, and key findings on enablers of and barriers to school engagement. Additionally, the paper identifies three significant themes requiring attention in future research: inconsistent framing of central themes, the prevalence of deficit accounts regarding refugee parents and students, and omissions concerning critical aspects of school engagement.
Using Pierre Bourdieu’s capital framework as a theoretical lens, this qualitative phenomenological case study explored the challenges that obstruct African refugee students’ access to higher education in Egypt. Fifteen African refugee students (ten male and five female) in Egypt responded to semi-structured interview questions to express their views regarding the challenges that prevent them from attending public and private post-secondary institutions. The authors identified these challenges and classified them into three thematic categories: sociocultural, economic and psychological barriers. In addition to these barriers, the lack of relevant laws and policies governing refugee access to higher education in Egypt and the absence of support systems have exacerbated an already dire situation for refugee students. The authors conclude their article with a number of recommendations to enhance and facilitate the access of refugees to higher education in their host communities.
Much of the literature on Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity (Pc/C) and African diasporas in the Global North has focused upon African-Majority or -Initiated churches that are either branches of African churches or were created in the diaspora. This focus often frames the appeal of Pc/C to African migrants in terms of: a) its emphasis upon the ‘Prosperity Gospel’ offering a path not only to salvation, but also to earthly riches; b) its opportunities for achieving status among church hierarchies, which is attractive to socially marginalised groups, and; c) the practical assistance it provides to support settlement. However, African diasporas have diverse histories of migration, and settlement experiences. This article considers the appeal of Pc/C to a group of professional African migrants in Australia, who self-identify as ‘middle-class’. It argues that professional African migrants have consciously favoured the Australian megachurch Hillsong over Australia’s African-Initiated churches. They have done so in pursuit of a process of an imagined class-mobility, and as a result, their choice of church can be understood as largely strategic.
For forcibly displaced people, high educational attainment is economically and socially empowering. Using experiences of African refugee youth in Australia as an empirical case and drawing on the capability approach to social justice, this paper aims to assess the substantiveness of education opportunities of refugees. Qualitative data were generated through policy review and semi-structured interviews. The analysis shows that not only are refugees invisible in equity policies, but educational inequality is also framed homogeneously as a lack of access. The restrictive framing disregards differences in people’s ability to convert resources into valuable outcomes. Specifically, the paper identifies four overlooked factors of educational inequality among African refugee youth: early disadvantage, limited navigational capacity, adaptive preferences, and racial stereotypes. Without an expansive view of disadvantage, it is hardly possible to break the link between marginal social position and low educational attainment of refugees.
Black African migrants have recently become a visible presence in Australia. Many arrived through the humanitarian resettlement programme, but far greater numbers come through the “skilled stream”. This paper explores recent research into these populations to tease out how material, social and existential elements of settlement intersect with belonging. As a heuristic, it uses Ager and Strang's ten markers and means of integration: material aspects (employment, housing, education and health); social connections internally and externally; facilitators (language, cultural knowledge, safety, stability); and rights and citizenship. A range of challenges to positive settlement and integration are identified, using these domains. However, Australian research has focused almost exclusively on African migrants of refugee background, with most sampling South Sudanese, making generalization impossible, even dangerous. The urgent need for research using wider samples, and more large‐scale quantitative work, is called for and a range of policy recommendations suggested.
For refugees, education provides life-changing opportunities, including tools for effective social integration. This study explores higher education (HE) participation among refugee-background African youth in Australia. Drawing on policy review, national HE statistics and population census data, and using theoretical insights from critical sociology and a capability approach to social justice, the article (a) maps trends of HE participation, and (b) sheds light on policy silences and alternatives. The findings show that only one in ten refugee-background African youth (aged 18–30) transitioned to HE within the first five years of their arrival. The group also lagged well behind the general population in terms of undergraduate course completion. In light of these concerns, the article calls for expanding the educational capabilities of the refugee youth, specifically highlighting the need for policy recognition, early intervention, and substantive opportunities that can be converted into valued outcomes.
This article explores how one cohort of first-in-family students narrated their movement into and through university, proposed as a form of boundary crossing. These metaphors emerged from the stories that students told about their persistence, with references ranging from institutional or organisational boundaries through to those imposed by self and others. Applying the sensitizing lens of boundary crossing, an analysis is provided of how learners navigated their transition into university and the types of persistence behaviours adopted. The focus is on those who traversed these boundaries, considering the nature of incursions and the ways these were negotiated within students’ everyday lives. This cohort all self-identified as being the first in their family to attend university but also acknowledged a variety of additional social, cultural and economic factors that impacted upon their educational journey.
More than forty years have passed since Congress, in response to the Civil Rights Movement, enacted sweeping antidiscrimination laws in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. As a signal achievement of that legacy, in 2008, Americans elected their first African American president. Some would argue that we have finally arrived at a postracial America, butThe Imperative of Integrationindicates otherwise. Elizabeth Anderson demonstrates that, despite progress toward racial equality, African Americans remain disadvantaged on virtually all measures of well-being. Segregation remains a key cause of these problems, and Anderson skillfully shows why racial integration is needed to address these issues. Weaving together extensive social science findings--in economics, sociology, and psychology--with political theory, this book provides a compelling argument for reviving the ideal of racial integration to overcome injustice and inequality, and to build a better democracy.Considering the effects of segregation and integration across multiple social arenas, Anderson exposes the deficiencies of racial views on both the right and the left. She reveals the limitations of conservative explanations for black disadvantage in terms of cultural pathology within the black community and explains why color blindness is morally misguided. Multicultural celebrations of group differences are also not enough to solve our racial problems. Anderson provides a distinctive rationale for affirmative action as a tool for promoting integration, and explores how integration can be practiced beyond affirmative action.Offering an expansive model for practicing political philosophy in close collaboration with the social sciences, this book is a trenchant examination of how racial integration can lead to a more robust and responsive democracy.
This major collection of essays, a sequel to Modernity at Large (1996), is the product of ten years' research and writing, constituting an important contribution to globalization studies. Appadurai takes a broad analytical look at the genealogies of the present era of globalization through essays on violence, commodification, nationalism, terror and materiality. Alongside a discussion of these wider debates, Appadurai situates India at the heart of his work, offering writing based on first-hand research among urban slum-dwellers in Mumbai, in which he examines their struggle to achieve equity, recognition and self-governance in conditions of extreme inequality. Finally, in his work on design, planning, finance and poverty, Appadurai embraces the "politics of hope" and lays the foundations for a revitalized, and urgent, anthropology of the future.
It is widely believed that countries with greater levels of income inequality also have lower levels of intergenerational
mobility. This relationship, known as the Great Gatsby Curve (GGC), has been prominently cited by high-ranking public policymakers,
bestselling authors, and Nobel Prize–winning academics. Yet, relatively little cross-national work has empirically examined
the mechanisms thought to underpin the GGC—particularly with regard to the role of educational attainment. This paper uses
the cross-nationally comparable Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) data set to shed new
light on this issue. We find that income inequality is associated with several key components of the intergenerational transmission
process—including access to higher education, the financial returns on education, and the residual effect of parental education
upon labor-market earnings. Thus, consistent with theoretical models, we find that educational attainment is an important
driver of the relationship between intergenerational mobility and income inequality. We hence conclude that unequal access
to financial resources plays a central role in the intergenerational transmission of advantage.
Primarily developed as an alternative to narrow measures of well-being such as utility and resources, Amartya Sen’s capability approach places strong emphasis on people’s substantive opportunities. As a broad normative framework, the capability approach has become a valuable tool for understanding and evaluating social arrangements (e.g. education policies and development programmes) in terms of individuals’ effective freedoms to achieve valuable beings and doings. This paper explores the recent emergence of ‘capability’ in Australian education policy, specifically in the Australia in the Asian Century White Paper. We explore capability as a framing device and reveal how its various meanings are at odds with the scholarly literature, specifically Sen’s conception of capability and its implications for social justice in and through education. The analysis shows that the social justice intent of a capability approach appears to be overtaken in the White Paper by an emphasis on outcomes, performance and functionings that seek to serve the nation’s economic interests more than the interests of students, especially the disadvantaged.
THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF MULTIMETHOD AND MIXED METHODS RESEARCH INQUIRY
Edited by Sharlene Hesse-Biber and R. Burke Johnson
The Oxford Handbook of Multi and Mixed Methods Research Inquiry is designed to offer a range of innovative knowledge-building perspectives and methods tools with the goal of enhancing new ways of asking and addressing complex research questions. The Handbook offers multiple quantitative and qualitative theoretical and interdisciplinary visions and practice. Each chapter is written in clear and concise language by leading scholars in the field.The Handbook reflects the most current thinking and scholarship on emerging multi and mixed methods research inquiry within and across the disciplines. Each chapter is structured to include state of the art research examples that cross a range of disciplines as well as interdisciplinary research settings. The Handbook stresses the diversity of research scholarship and with some chapters taking a more in-depth global and social justice focus. Researchers, faculty, and graduate students, as well as policy makers, will be drawn to the Handbook’s goals and practice. The Handbook aims to become an exceptional, timely, and critical research benchmark. It addresses interdisciplinary and complex questions that traverse a range of research communities both in and outside the academy, and its empirical focus demonstrates the potential of multi and mixed methods research inquiry.
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This article conceptualizes community cultural wealth as a critical race theory (CRT) challenge to traditional interpretations of cultural capital. CRT shifts the research lens away from a deficit view of Communities of Color as places full of cultural poverty disadvantages, and instead focuses on and learns from the array of cultural knowledge, skills, abilities and contacts possessed by socially marginalized groups that often go unrecognized and unacknowledged. Various forms of capital nurtured through cultural wealth include aspirational, navigational, social, linguistic, familial and resistant capital. These forms of capital draw on the knowledges Students of Color bring with them from their homes and communities into the classroom. This CRT approach to education involves a commitment to develop schools that acknowledge the multiple strengths of Communities of Color in order to serve a larger purpose of struggle toward social and racial justice.
Economic and social resources are known to contribute to the unequal distribution of health outcomes. Culture-related factors such as normative beliefs, knowledge and behaviours have also been shown to be associated with health status. The role and function of cultural resources in the unequal distribution of health is addressed. Drawing on the work of French Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the concept of cultural capital for its contribution to the current understanding of social inequalities in health is explored. It is suggested that class related cultural resources interact with economic and social capital in the social structuring of people's health chances and choices. It is concluded that cultural capital is a key element in the behavioural transformation of social inequality into health inequality. New directions for empirical research on the interplay between economic, social and cultural capital are outlined.
Access to educational opportunities is instrumental for social integration of refugee youth. This paper reports on a qualitative case study of educational aspirations and experiences of refugee-background African youth (RAY) in Melbourne, Australia. Guided by a capability approach to social justice, in-depth interviews were conducted with two groups of RAY: those who have transitioned to higher education (HE), and those who have not transitioned to HE after completing high school. The findings show that: (a) RAY share a firm belief in the value of HE; (b) but they are differently positioned to convert opportunities into achievements – e.g. only the refugee youth with high levels of navigational capacity take advantage of the available flexible pathways to HE; (c) the stress of racism pervades the educational experiences of both groups; and (d) some African refugee youth have shown a considerable level of resilience in that, despite the challenges of racism, a history of disrupted educational trajectories and a lack of scholarly resources at home, they have transitioned to and thrived in HE. In light of these findings, the paper draws some implications for equity policies and practices.
We explore the ramifications of applying Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of capitals to epidemiological research on socioeconomic health inequalities. Capitals are resources used by individuals and groups to maintain and enhance their positions in the social order. The notion of capital interplay refers to the interconnectedness of multiple forms of capital in the production of good health. We provide definitions of economic, cultural and social capitals and describe a variety of causally distal processes—namely, capital acquisition, multiplier and transmission interplays—from which new hypotheses can be developed to guide future study of socioeconomic health inequalities in modern societies.
This paper offers a conceptual framework that combines Sen’s concept of capability and Bourdieu’s forms of capital to understand the generative mechanisms of educational advantage or disadvantage. The paper illustrates some ways that the Sen–Bourdieu framework can be applied to understand the Programme for International Student Assessment 2015 results and measures of educational contexts for Australia. The Programme for International Student Assessment 2015 results indicated that students’ socioeconomic background and student-level and school-level factors affect their educational performance. Guided by the proposed framework, the paper explains some of these effects and the contexts in which they occur. It suggests educational disadvantages are attributable to economic capital and other forms of capital within broader structural, representational and relational contexts of schooling practices. The implications for improving equity in education are to recognise forms of capital that enable or limit students’ educational capabilities, identify contexts and schooling practices in which such enablers or limitations occur, and improve opportunities as well as processes in schools in ways that secure students’ differences and uniqueness.
This paper offers a critical examination of the nature of inequalit ies in relation to education and the pursuit of social justice. It ar gues that assessment of educational resources and measures such as school enrolment and educational achievement are limited in what they tell us about the injustices learners may experience . I t is propos ed that, drawing on Amartya Sen’s capability approac h , we benefit from extend ing our evaluative space beyond learners ’ achieve ments to encompass their freedoms to achieve. I t is argued that attention should be paid to the relative value individuals place on the se various freedoms . Furthermore, i n order to d eepen insights into the multiple factors influencing the development of learner values , and the unequal possibilities for realising their aspired valued achievement s , the discussion also draws on key sociological concepts from Pierre Bourdieu. The theoreti cal synthesis leads to the introduction of the Sen ‐ Bourdieu Analytical Framework (SBAF) , a conceptual model that illustrates the socially dynamic processes within which learners and formal educationa l systems are situated. The principal aims are to offer an alternative development paradigm and an expanded evaluative framework to inform local, national and international educational polic y and practice.
Lauren Berlant explores individual and collective affective responses to the unraveling of the U.S. and European economies by analzying mass media, literature, television, film, and video.
Buddha is Hiding tells the story of Cambodian Americans experiencing American citizenship from the bottom up. Based on extensive fieldwork in Oakland and San Francisco, this study puts a human face on the pmpact of U.S. institutions -- medical, social welfare, judicial, religious, and economic -- on refugees who in negotiating a strange new culture, also shape their own identity.
This landmark study provides the first comprehensive assessment of the nature and associations between the three main forms of social disadvantage in Australia: poverty, deprivation and social exclusion. Drawing on the author's extensive research expertise and his links with welfare practitioners, it explains the limitations of existing approaches and presents new findings that build on the insights of disadvantaged Australians and views about the essentials of life, providing the basis for a new deprivation-based poverty measure.
This book examines the university experiences of first-in-family university students, and how these students’ decisions to return to education impact upon their family members and significant others. While it is well known that parental educational background has a substantial impact on the educational levels of family and dependents, it is unclear how attending university as a first-in-family student translates into the family and community of the learner. With the continuing requirements for higher education institutions to increase the participation of students from a range of diverse backgrounds and educational biographies, this is a major gap in understanding that needs to be addressed.
Exploring how this university participation is understood at an individual, familial and community level, this book provides valuable insights into how best to support different student requirements. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers in the fields of education and sociology, as well as policy-makers in education and diversity initiatives.
This latest volume in the World Yearbook of Education Series focuses on educational elites and inequality, focusing particularly on the ways in which established and emergent groups located at the top of the social hierarchy and power structure reproduce, establish or redefine their position.The volume is organized around three main issues:- analyzing the way in which parents, students and graduates in positions of social advantage use their assets and capitals in relation to educational strategies, and how these are different for old and new and cultural and economic elites;- studying how elite institutions have adapted their strategies to take into account changes in the social structure, in policy and in their institutional environment and exploring the impact of these strategies on educational systems at the national and global levels;- mapping the new global dynamics in elite education and how new forms of 'international education' and 'transnational cultural capital' as well as new global educational elite pathways shape elite students’ identities, status and trajectories. Making use of a social and an institutional approach as well as a focus on practices and policies, the volume draws on research conducted on secondary schools and on higher education. In addition, the global contributions within the book allow for a comparison and contrast of situations in different countries. This results in a comprehensive picture of common processes and national differences concerning advantage and excellence and a thorough examination of the impact of globalization on the strategies, identities and trajectories of elite groups and individuals alongside more general cultural and economic processes. (Résumé éditeur)
The work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has stimulated new interest in habituated forms of conduct. His concept of habitus has become a leading reference in the growing sociological literature on theories of human action as practices. This article presents Bourdieu's concept of habitus by calling attention to its intellectual context and identifying the features that relate to the sociology of habit. The article identifies common characteristics of action regulated by habit and offers four programmatic implications for occupational therapy interventions.
Class does make a difference in the lives and futures of American children. Drawing on in-depth observations of black and white middle-class, working-class, and poor families, Unequal Childhoods explores this fact, offering a picture of childhood today. Here are the frenetic families managing their children's hectic schedules of "leisure" activities; and here are families with plenty of time but little economic security. Lareau shows how middle-class parents, whether black or white, engage in a process of "concerted cultivation" designed to draw out children's talents and skills, while working-class and poor families rely on "the accomplishment of natural growth," in which a child's development unfolds spontaneously—as long as basic comfort, food, and shelter are provided. Each of these approaches to childrearing brings its own benefits and its own drawbacks. In identifying and analyzing differences between the two, Lareau demonstrates the power, and limits, of social class in shaping the lives of America's children. The first edition of Unequal Childhoods was an instant classic, portraying in riveting detail the unexpected ways in which social class influences parenting in white and African American families. A decade later, Annette Lareau has revisited the same families and interviewed the original subjects to examine the impact of social class in the transition to adulthood.
Amartya Sen (1933–) was born and educated in India before completing his doctorate in economics at Cambridge University. He has taught in India, England, and the United States and is currently the Lamont University Professor at Harvard University. He is one of the most widely read and influential living economists. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages. In 1998, he was awarded the Nobel Price in Economics for his work on welfare economics, poverty and famines, and human development. He has also made major contributions to contemporary political philosophy. In this essay, he proposes that alternatives be appraised by looking to the capabilities they provide for individuals rather than only by individual utilities, incomes, or resources (as in commonly used theories). Introduction Capability is not an awfully attractive word. It has a technocratic sound, and to some it might even suggest the image of nuclear war strategists rubbing their hands in pleasure over some contingent plan of heroic barbarity. The term is not much redeemed by the historical Capability Brown praising particular pieces of land – not human beings – on the solid real-estate ground that they ‘had capabilities’. Perhaps a nicer word could have been chosen when some years ago I tried to explore a particular approach to well-being and advantage in terms of a person's ability to do valuable acts or reach valuable states of being.
* Brand new analysis of the concept of disadvantage
* A contribution to the understanding of equality at both a theoretical and practical level
What does it mean to be disadvantaged? Is it possible to compare different disadvantages? What should governments do to move their societies in the direction of equality, where equality is to be understood both in distributional and social terms? Linking rigorous analytical philosophical theory with broad empirical studies, including interviews conducted for the purpose of this book, Wolff and de-Shalit show how taking theory and practice together is essential if the theory is to be rich enough to be applied to the real world, and policy systematic enough to have purpose and justification.
The book is in three parts. Part 1 presents a pluralist analysis of disadvantage, modifying the capability theory of Sen and Nussbaum to produce the 'genuine opportunity for secure functioning' view. This emphasises risk and insecurity as a central component of disadvantage. Part 2 shows how to identify the least advantaged in society even on a pluralist view. The authors suggest that disadvantage 'clusters' in the sense that some people are disadvantaged in several different respects. Thus identifying the least advantaged is not as problematic as it appears to be. Conversely, a society which has 'declustered disadvantaged' - in the sense that no group lacks secure functioning on a range of functionings - has made considerable progress in the direction of equality. Part 3 explores how to decluster disadvantage, by paying special attention to 'corrosive disadvantages' - those disadvantages which cause further disadvantages - and 'fertile functionings' - those which are likely to secure other functionings.
In sum this books presents a refreshing new analysis of disadvantage, and puts forward proposals to help governments improve the lives of the least advantaged in their societies, thereby moving in the direction of equality.
I use the collection of "carnal ethnographies" of martial arts and combat sports assembled by Raul Sanchez and Dale Spencer under the title Fighting Scholarsto spotlight the fruitfulness of deploying habitus as both empirical object (explanandum) and method of inquiry (modus cognitionis). The incarnate study of incarnation supports five propositions that clear up tenacious misconceptions about habitus and bolster Bourdieu's dispositional theory of action: (1) far from being a "black box" habitus is fully amenable to empirical inquiry; (2) the distinction between primary (generic) and secondary (specific) habitus enables us to capture the malleability of dispositions; (3) habitus is composed of cognitive, conative and affective elements: categories, skills, and desires; (4) habitus allows us to turn carnality from problem to resource for the production of sociological knowledge; and (5) thus to realize that all social agents are, like martial artists, suffering beings collectively engaged in embodied activities staged inside circles of shared commitments.
This article will explore the ways in which ambivalence around immigration was revealed through more conditional regulation of white and non-white immigration and through narratives of deportation involving romance and children. Using textual analysis of newspapers and political discourse—tropes of normative heterosexuality— happy couples and mothers with children reveal themselves as apparent contradictions to otherwise dehumanising imagery and discourses of illegality, while still cementing the regulation of “Australianness” through equally conditional means.
This article explores how urban working-class young people's performances of embodied identities - as enacted through practices of 'taste' and style - are played out within the educational field. The article considers how such practices may contribute to shaping young people's post- 16 'choices' and their views of higher education as 'not for me'. Drawing on data from longitudinal tracking interviews with 53 individual young people and discussion groups with a further 36 pupils, the articles discusses the double-bind experienced by these young people as a result of their performances of style. It is argued that whilst the young people seek to generate worth and value through their investments in style, these practices may also play into oppressive social relations and contribute to fixing the young people within marginalized and disadvantaged social positions.
John Howard's language of battlers, elites and refugees draws on the historic imagining of citizenship by emphasising values. In responding to the issue of refugees, he contradictorily and pragmatically used his version of the language of Australian citizenship as the target of threat and a source of stability which involved displaying empathy and discernment for the imagined collection of middle Australia, but it lacked compassion for the groups falling outside the domain of that imagining.
Class affects not only our material wealth but our access to relationships and practices which we have reason to value, including the esteem or respect of others and hence our sense of self-worth. it determines the kind of people we become and our chances of living a fulfilling life. Applying concepts from moral philosophy and social theory to empirical studies of class, this accessible study demonstrates how people are valued in a context of the lottery of birth class, or forces having little to do with moral qualities or other merits.
The Centre for the Study of Higher Education was commissioned to analyse the performance of equity groups in higher education during the period 1991- 2002 and to investigate whether the definitions of equity groups are still appropriate. The project team analysed DEST’s Higher Education Student Statistics Collection for the period 1991-2002 inclusive, examining the performance of five groups: • people from low socio-economic backgrounds; • people from rural or isolated areas; • people with a disability; • people from a non-English speaking background; and • women, especially in non-traditional areas of study and higher degrees. The project team was not asked to analyse the performance of Indigenous people.
Interpretive policy analysis entails the application to studies of public policies of approaches building on ontological and epistemological presuppositions deriving from interpretive philosophies. Its central characteristic is its focus on meaning. Interpretive policy analyses are, then, situation‐specific, rather than entailing general laws or universal principles. They commonly focus on the language used in policy debates, as well as on other human artifacts that convey policy and organizational meanings, such as people's acts and whatever objects they might use in those acts. Interpretive policy analysis is an alternative to survey research, cost‐benefit analysis, and other such approaches.
This paper aims to present a theoretical survey of the capability approach in an interdisciplinary and accessible way. It focuses on the main conceptual and theoretical aspects of the capability approach, as developed by Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and others. The capability approach is a broad normative framework for the evaluation and assessment of individual well-being and social arrangements, the design of policies, and proposals about social change in society. Its main characteristics are its highly interdisciplinary character, and the focus on the plural or multidimensional aspects of well-being. The approach highlights the difference between means and ends, and between substantive freedoms (capabilities) and outcomes (achieved functionings).
While empirical evidence continues to show that low socio-economic position is associated with less likely chances of being in good health, our understanding of why this is so remains less than clear. In this paper we examine the theoretical foundations for a structure-agency approach to the reduction of social inequalities in health. We use Max Weber's work on lifestyles to provide the explanation for the dualism between life chances (structure) and choice-based life conduct (agency). For explaining how the unequal distribution of material and non-material resources leads to the reproduction of unequal life chances and limitations of choice in contemporary societies, we apply Pierre Bourdieu's theory on capital interaction and habitus. We find, however, that Bourdieu's habitus concept is insufficient with regard to the role of agency for structural change and therefore does not readily provide for a theoretically supported move from sociological explanation to public health action. We therefore suggest Amartya Sen's capability approach as a useful link between capital interaction theory and action to reduce social inequalities in health. This link allows for the consideration of structural conditions as well as an active role for individuals as agents in reducing these inequalities. We suggest that people's capabilities to be active for their health be considered as a key concept in public health practice to reduce health inequalities. Examples provided from an ongoing health promotion project in Germany link our theoretical perspective to a practical experience.
First publ.in French,Paris,Ed.de Minuit,1970,La Réproduction: éléments pour une théorie du système d'enseignement.Incl.bibl., index,app., glossaire
Amartya Sen addresses the question why he is disinclined to provide a fixed list of capabilities to go with his general capability approach. Capability assessment can be used for different purposes (varying from poverty evaluation to the assessment of human rights or of human development), and public reasoning and discussion are necessary for selecting relevant capabilities and weighing them against each other in each context. It would be a mistake to build a mausoleum for a “fixed and final” list of capabilities usable for every purpose and unaffected by the progress of understanding of the social role and importance of different capabilities.
Review of Australian higher education: Final report
- D Bradley
- P Noonan
- H Nugent
- B Scales