Current scholarship has critiqued the lack of individual stories of refugees amidst the focus on the alarming increase today in human displacement and rising nationalism. The current book project by the REAL team, Accessing Quality Education for Refugees: Local and Global Perspectives (Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield) profiles the voices of local refugees from a broad array of countries, and their experiences with educational access and quality within the broader global context of displacement. By interviewing refugees themselves, we are better able to prepare research and policy recommendations to address these issues in a context-specific manner, bridging the gap between refugees’ lived experiences and research and policy expertise.
Accessing Quality Education for Refugees frames the stories and profiles of individual refugees in the Washington, DC, area within a large range of broader themes that refugees confront locally and globally. The data consists of a triangulation of sources: a) review of the forced migration literature from academic and media reporting; b) in-depth refugee interviews; and c) interviews with academic experts on migration for help framing the DMV sample within the broader picture of refugee access to quality education in host countries. The members of the REAL bring a wealth of knowledge and professional experience in previous work with refugee and migrant populations in the U.S. and abroad and across a variety of educational settings and contexts.
