Refugee education has been widely examined through humanitarian, human rights, development, and integration approaches; however, limited research explores how refugees themselves interpret and give meaning to education across displacement. By centerin...
Refugee education has been widely examined through humanitarian, human rights, development, and integration approaches; however, limited research explores how refugees themselves interpret and give meaning to education across displacement. By centering these lived interpretations, this dissertation contributes to an emerging body of critical scholarship that calls for justice-oriented, participatory, and epistemically inclusive approaches to refugee education. South Korea—the first country in Asia to enact a national Refugee Act, yet still underrepresented in refugee education research—serves as the context of this study. Adopting a justice-oriented lens, this study employs an integrated framework that combines Novelli et al.’s (2017) 4Rs of redistribution, recognition, representation, and reconciliation with Anderson et al.’s (2003) refugee adaptation model extending Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory. Using narrative inquiry, field texts were co-constructed over six months through semi-structured interviews,
informal conversations, fieldnotes, and participant-shared artifacts mainly with six members of an Afghan refugee family. Findings reveal that education is not experienced merely as institutional access or integration, but as a political, moral, relational, and temporal practice through which refugees sustain dignity, continuity, and futurity. Three central themes emerged: (1) resistance, enacted through everyday efforts to navigate gendered expectations, language barriers, and systemic exclusion; (2) becoming, wherein identity and aspiration are reconfigured within disrupted temporalities of migration; and (3) relationality, characterized by informal infrastructures of care provided by family, peers, teachers, and community actors in the absence of consistent state support. By reframing education as a site of meaning-making rather than service delivery, this study advances refugee education scholarship toward epistemic agency and moral practice, underscoring the need for educational systems globally to move beyond inclusion
as mere access and toward relational, justice-oriented approaches that honor the lived experiences of refugees.