Reading Refugee/(Im)Migrant Education Diffractively: Transdisciplinary Exploration of Matters That Matter and Matter That Matters in Refugee/(Im)Migrant Education

Abstract

This paper is a conceptual exploration and diffractive reading of refugee/(im)migrant education through multiple lenses, including data-driven decision making, critical refugee studies, new materialism and critical feminist and posthumanist studies, and trans theorizations such as Black trans feminism. After a brief introduction to “the field” of refugee/(im)migrant education, the paper turns to diffractive readings of refugee/(im)migrant education as means of exploring what is the matter, as in the material and discursive substance, in refugee/(im)migrant education, and why and how (including when, where, and by whom) does that matter come to matter? The paper concludes with discoveries, or findings, from this diffractive, transdisciplinary exploration and considerations for educators, policymakers, researchers, activists, and other actors (co)constituting and “becoming with” refugee/(im)migrant education.

1. Introduction

In recent years, increased attention is being paid to refugee/(im)migrant education1 in the U.S. (e.g., Bajaj et al. 2023; Manning et al. 2022) and around the world (e.g., Arar 2020; Celik et al. 2023; Dryden-Peterson 2016, 2022; Henderson 2023; Mendenhall et al. 2017b; Molla 2023; Shapiro et al. 2018; Wiseman et al. 2019; UNHCR 2023c). This is for a number of reasons, not least of which is the rapidly increasing number of people who are being forcibly displaced from their homes worldwide—an estimated 110 million as of mid-2023 (UNHCR 2023b)—alongside persistent inequities in education access, quality, and outcomes (Schmelkes 2020; UNHCR 2023c; U.S. Department of Education 2017). Despite efforts to codify refugee inclusion in national education systems through the Global Compact on Refugees (United Nations 2018) and UNHCR’s Education 2030 strategy document (UNHCR 2019), more than half of all refugee children are not enrolled in school, with only 38 percent of refugee children enrolled in pre-primary education and less than six percent of refugee youth engaged in tertiary education (UNHCR 2023c). The quality and types of schooling experiences vary greatly as well (Dryden-Peterson 2015; UNHCR 2023c; United Nations 2022), ranging, for example, from “international schools” designed for newcomers in the U.S. (e.g., Mendenhall et al. 2017a), to “transition” language programs for migrants in Germany (e.g., Panagiotopoulou and Rosen 2018), to “second shift” schools for Syrian refugee students in Lebanon and Jordan (e.g., Salem 2021). In the U.S., where I am situated geopolitically and through my teacher-scholar-leader-learner experience, the 1982 Plyler v. Doe federal court case established that states cannot deny any child a free, public education regardless of immigration status, thus mandating full “inclusion” of refugee/(im)migrant learners in public schools. As many scholars and practitioners have noted (e.g., Bajaj et al. 2023; Koyama and Turan 2023; Manning et al. 2022; Mendenhall et al. 2017a), however, policies and practices of dis/unbelonging, inequities in experience and outcomes, lack of appropriate and adequate resources, and limited preparation for teachers, school leaders, counselors, social workers, and other school and district staff means that disparities in refugee/(im)migrant education are pervasive (e.g., Anderson et al. 2023; Hos 2020; Sugarman and Geary 2018; Umansky and Avelar 2023; Vigil and Lopez 2020). These are matters—concerns and issues—that matter in refugee/(im)migrant education.

This paper is a conceptual exploration that asks questions about these matters. Specifically, what is the matter, as in the material and discursive substance, in refugee/(im)migrant education, and why and how (including when, where, and by whom) does that matter come to matter? In this paper, I introduce four material-discursive fields or research/practice apparatuses—each anchored in its own ethico-onto-epistemologies2 (Barad 2007)—for diffractive readings of refugee/(im)migrant education. I start with an overview of refugee/(im)migrant education in the United States through the lens of data-driven decision making as situated within neoliberalism and its efforts at standardization, accountability, and “choice” or marketization in public education. The discussion then moves to understandings, contestations, and (re)clamations of “refugeeness”, including around policy, perception, and protest through critical refugee studies. Taking a bit of a quantum leap, literally (thinking with Barad) and metaphorically, I turn next to tools for thinking other/wise through new materialist and critical feminist and posthuman theorizations of intra-activity, entanglement, and becoming-with. Finally, readers are invited to journey through and across trans*ethico-onto-epistemologies, including translanguaging, transworlding, and Black trans feminism to explore possibilities for thinking difference differently in consideration of possibilities and liberatory potential in refugee/(im)migrant education. I put these four conceptual and theoretical orientations3 into conversation with each other as materials (matter) and methods (mattering) because they have influenced and continue to influence my work in refugee/(im)migrant education and because they create puzzles that cannot be solved due to their co-constituting entanglements. Collectively, intra-actively, they move me. I find myself pulled away from normative terrain and familiar patterns of knowing, measuring, reflecting on, solving and, in some way, thus claiming knowledge, ownership, or mastery in/of refugee/(im)migrant education. I “get lost” (Lather 2007) and find myself better able to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway 2016) “as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present” (ibid, p. 1), a practice that matters in refugee/(im)migrant education.

I invite readers to engage the materials and methods—the offered conceptual lenses—diffractively, “cut[ting] things together-apart (as one movement)” (Barad 2012a, p. 32), as a way of getting productively lost and as a means of staying present. Bozalek (2021) describes diffractive reading as “care-full, attentive, detailed and responsive reading of one through the other without foregrounding one or the other” (p. 136), a way of imag(in)ing refugee/(im)migrant education “through the interference of diffractive patterns” (p. 136, emphasis in original). Barad (2007) defines “diffraction patterns” as the “marking [of] differences from within as part of an entangled state” in contrast to reflexive practices, which present mirror images or the “reflection of objects held at a distance” (p. 89). In this article, refugee/(im)migrant education is being considered (and co-constituted) as entangled matter(s) and we—the author, the readers, the words, this journal, and so much more—are all mixed up in it, not separate or apart from it. Barad explains that “diffraction effects limit the ability of a lens (or system of lenses) to resolve an image. The greater the diffraction effects, the less determinate the boundaries of an image are, that is, the more the resolution is compromised” (Barad 2007, p. 377). This article, thinking with Barad and Bozalek’s diffractive methods, is not about seeing refugee/(im)migrant education more clearly but, rather, about reading it diffractively to distort and unsettle material and discursive un/known matter(s) “becoming with” (Haraway 2016) and through refugee/(im)migrant education. Diffractive reading invites exploration, including through interpretations and understandings that are not foretold, foreshadowed, or otherwise predetermined but are, rather, unexpected. An (intra)active and messy process, I will engage the aforementioned materials and methods diffractively before finding my way to “findings” and toward a concluding mo(ve)ment.4

2. Materials and Methods: Working with Matter(s) That Matter(s)

2.1. Neoliberalism and Data-Driven Decision Making: Refugee/(Im)Migrant Student Matter(s) in U.S. Education

Data-driven decision making (DDDM), and its neoliberal orientation to education policy and practice, are important starting points for many scholars, policymakers, education leaders, and educators thinking about refugee/(im)migrant education. Since A Nation at Risk (United States, National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983) was published, and certainly even before this publication, government officials and education leaders have been obsessed with data and the many problems in need of solutions that data, arguably, make visible. Refugee/(im)migrant education as a sub-system in larger education ecosystems, including national education systems, has similarly been defined by problems in need of solutions made visible through data (e.g., Graham et al. 2017; Nayir 2017; Rodriguez 2015; Taylor and Sidhu 2012; Wiseman and Bell 2022) and, simultaneously, because of missing data sets (UNHCR 2023a). Neoliberal and DDDM-influenced systems’ actors argue that with increased standardization, accountability, choice, competition, and efficiencies regulated through “data”—often narrowly defined through particular quantifiable categorizations, as will be discussed in further detail below—quality can be assured for every child, regardless of background or life experience, in a colorblind or race-neutral legal/market environment that “levels” the field (Ambrosio 2013; Hursh 2007, 2018; Leonardo and Tran 2013). No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) are two landmark U.S. federal initiatives born of a DDDM orientation, coming out of different, but intra-related, socio-economic and political moments that have accelerated expansion of curriculum, assessment, and edtech private industry markets in the U.S. and DDDM policies and practices, such as punishing accountability regimes, in schools and public education systems.

Despite considered discussion of the affordances and constraints of data-based decision making, as evidenced in Mandinach and Schildkamp (2018) and numerous other scholarly and policy works invested in thinking with and through data in its diverse forms and with complexity in education settings, criticisms of DDDM link it to neoliberalism’s dehumanizing practices (e.g., Sellers and Imig 2020; Wang 2019), marketization, and privatization efforts that erode “collaboration amongst those responsible for student success efforts” (Taylor 2020, p. 1069), “inducing compliance but not necessarily improving student learning” (ibid, p. 1075). Furthermore, as Taylor highlights through the experiences shared by higher education faculty in their study (ibid, p. 1085), and as Wiseman and Bell (2022) note in focused consideration of refugee, asylee, and humanitarian migrant students in public schools, the data necessary to inform decisions are often missing or inaccessible. Standardization of curricula, high-stakes testing, surveillance of learners, teachers, and school leaders, alongside competition for resources amongst students, schools, and districts, are tied to DDDM despite known gaps in the data informing those decisions (Taylor 2020; Wiseman and Bell 2022) and despite concerns about its interpretation and application by teachers and school leaders (e.g., Datnow and Hubbard 2016; Mandinach and Gummer 2015; Means et al. 2011; Taylor 2020). In problem–solution oriented data-driven education systems, isibility of school success, or failure, through data shores up arguments for greater school “choice” and masks attendant inequities in the choice movement, particularly for students who have been historically and systemically marginalized, including students of color, culturally and linguistically diverse learners, students living in poverty, and students with special needs (e.g., Bierbaum et al. 2021; Jessen 2013; Lenhoff 2020; Lewis-McCoy 2014; Lipman 2011; Potterton 2020; Sattin-Bajaj 2015; Sattin-Bajaj and Roda 2020; Yoon 2020). The market logics at play and the data in use have led to an astonishing simultaneity of both invisibility and hypervisibility—through racialization and monoglossic language ideologies and policies (e.g., Alim et al. 2016; Charity Hudley 2017; Hill 1998; Koyama and Kasper 2022; Lee 2005; Mitchell 2013; Motha 2006; Rosa 2019; Smalls 2020; Song et al. 2021)—of refugee/(im)migrant students in schools. This section turns now to this matter, as “data” that matters, in thinking about refugee/(im)migrant education.

Within U.S. education systems writ large, refugee/(im)migrant student data sets are limited, and where available, often at a site or local level, little distinction is made between legal status categories of refugee/(im)migrant children or even between newcomer refugee/(im)migrants and children born within the United States to refugee/(im)migrant parents. U.S. education data sets prioritize race/ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, special needs, and English language ability categorizations. Refugee/(im)migrant students can be found across the full spectrum within each of these categories and, in some ways, are lost or obscured by these particular ways of parsing data that do not, usually, account for country of origin or migrant/citizen status and thus make it hard to “see” and understand the experiences, performance, and outcomes of a heterogeneous refugee/(im)migrant student subgroup (Wiseman and Bell 2022). In a report at the turn of the millennium from the Urban Institute, aptly titled “Overlooked and Underserved”, a lack of disaggregated data is identified as a significant barrier to serving immigrant students. The authors, Ruiz-de-Velasco and Fix (2000), write

Data issues […] arose. Efforts to identify LEP [Limited English Proficient] students and their changing instructional needs were hampered by the limited amount of data collected and shared with teachers on immigrant and LEP students, their backgrounds, and their performance. Limited performance data also made it impossible to assess the effectiveness of differing approaches to instruction.

(pp. 13–14)

The situation has not improved over the past two decades. In the wealth of data about students in U.S. public schools, there are persistent lacunae around specific subgroups of students, including refugee/(im)migrant students. As Wiseman and Bell (2022) note in their discussion of refugee, asylee, and humanitarian migrants (RAHM),

… data that are collected and publicly reported are either (1) so localized that it cannot be replicated or generalized or (2) so aggregated that any characteristics, which would allow educational decision-makers to understand the context, characteristics, and specific needs of students, are washed out.

(p. 96)

Thinking about this data gap in relation to DDDM and neoliberal constructs of choice and accountability—and subsequent policy and practice gaps in refugee/(im)migrant education—raises concerns around ensuring quality and attaining equity for students and families of refugee/(im)migrant backgrounds.

Often, refugee/(im)migrant students are conflated with English learners (ELs) or recognized as emergent bilinguals (EBs) in U.S. education systems and research, given that many refugee/(im)migrant students—but not all—start their U.S. educational journeys in English language development (ELD), bilingual, or dual language classes. Most commonly, assumptions are made about refugee/(im)migrant students’ citizenship/migration status based on initial paperwork filled out at the moment of school registration and as part of a placement process, including home language surveys (HLSs), which make evident languages other than English in use within a child’s home. While these HLSs are no indication of citizenship status or refugee/(im)migrant background, they often stand in as a proxy for schools looking to identify refugee/(im)migrant students who are entitled to equal access to primary and secondary education regardless of “actual or perceived national origin, citizenship, or immigration status” (U.S. Department of Education 2014). Hence, refugee/(im)migrant students are made visible through a sorting mechanism that is centered on their deficits, in most cases, as ELs or children needing to learn the primary language of instruction in the United States: English. Refugee/(im)migrant students are otherwise invisibilized, however, within data systems that disaggregate primarily for race/ethnicity, gender, free/reduced lunch (poverty) status, special needs, language services (EL), and homelessness (McKinney-Vento), as noted previously.5

Koyama and Turan (2023) argue that “we need to illuminate not obscure the variability and complexity of immigrant and refugee youth’s experiences” (p. 200). In their study of one southwest U.S. school district, Koyama and Turan find that “refugees were used when it was convenient to bolster certain student demographic numbers” (Koyama and Turan 2023, p. 201) and argue that because of skewed and limited data sets, students and their schooling experiences are “faded and flattened to fit within the limiting categories measured by authoritative bodies and institutions, which also determine future resources and services” (ibid, p. 202). They conclude that

… the ways in which students are labeled, sorted, and ranked in official documents and unofficial discourses also affects students’ educational experiences—especially those who are minoritized, marginalized, and historically deprived of access and opportunity in formal education contexts, such as schools.

(ibid, p. 205)

Similarly, Wiseman and Bell (2022) assert that “to understand and make evidence-based educational decisions, policymakers and educators … need data on RAHM students’ (1) education experiences, (2) teacher preparation, and (3) key obstacles to learning” (p. 100). In short, not only in an era of DDDM and neoliberal choice and competition structures in education but also in a time of racialized violence, monoglossic language policies, and gross inequalities in schooling experiences and outcomes (e.g., Anyon 2014; Hamm-Rodríguez and Morales 2021; Hung et al. 2020; Lewis-McCoy 2014; Ramanathan 2013; Shedd 2015), additional data—including “transgressive” data (St. Pierre 1997) and data that get hands dirty (Lather 2009)—are, arguably, needed to understand and take action to improve experiences and outcomes in refugee/(im)migrant education.

In sum, refugee/(im)migrant students and their families lack clear data “footprints” in education and are thus left out of decision-making processes, except in an abstract and messy aggregate that excludes as much as it includes. They are positioned as “foreign” matter in U.S. education systems. Ibrahim (2020) sutures this to language, arguing, “They [refugee/(im)migrants] are not expected to be ‘here’, they are supposed to be over ‘there’, overseas, in a distant land that we occasionally hear about but we do not feel, smell, or touch—and we most certainly do not know its language” (p. 167). As articulated by Koyama and Turan (2023), refugee/(im)migrant students are “flattened” within data-driven diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts, including monoglossic English language learning frameworks that are unable to account for their full cultural and linguistic repertoires, their broad and complex range of differences, their diversity of being as individuals, their evolving legal status(es), their varied and shifting (un/marked) racialization within U.S. society and schools, and their becoming-with or the co-constituting assemblages in which they are created and which they, themselves, create.

Thinking about data gaps in refugee/(im)migrant education as briefly outlined—and the subsequent policy and practice gaps sutured to data through DDDM—seemingly limits mobility, or room, to maneuver and act. If one cannot clearly name, count, or account for experiences and outcomes through large and accessible data sets in refugee/(im)migrant education, how does one mobilize resources/funds, inspire creativity and innovation, or otherwise address challenges and create opportunities? At least this is what neoliberal and DDDM policymakers, education leaders, and researchers would lead one to wonder. If, however, one considers these “gaps” within critical refugee studies, quantum and new materialist conceptualizations, and trans theories and modes of analysis (to be discussed below) as, themselves, co-constituting and agential opportunities ripe with potential for and with refugee/(im)migrant education, then little is foreclosed, or at least not in the ways currently suggested within DDDM and neoliberal paradigms.

2.2. Critical Refugee Studies: Existential Reinforcement or Degridding of Legal and Nation-State Boundaries and Subject Positions?

Critical refugee studies (CRS) provides fertile ground for a differently positioned and inflected exploration of refugee/(im)migrant education than that made available with and through DDDM and neoliberal (ac)counting (of) students. In this way, it is a productive diffractive lens that introduces new patterns and differential interferences in the matter(s) of refugee/(im)migrant education. CRS draws attention to language and to power by calling into question the notion of “refugee” and working to unsettle legal boundaries that define refugees as distinct from im/migrants, generally, and “citizens” of nation-states, specifically. Citing the foundational work of Espiritu (2006), Tang (2015) notes that, as an emergent field, CRS “refuses to locate the refugee as an object to be studied, a problem to be solved, or a legal classification to be dissected” (p. 5). This stands in contrast to neoliberal efforts to “pin down” refugee/(im)migrants in education as language learners, through DEI initiatives or within data sets largely focused on documenting deficits and surveilling failure as part of a larger divestment strategy in public education (e.g., Ewing 2018; Royal and Cothorne 2021; Lipman 2011; Schneider and Berkshire 2020). Still, CRS battles for definition of and stakes claims on territories that include refugee/(im)migrant education, including through a call for “refugee teaching—that is, teaching done by and for refugees” (Espiritu et al. 2022, p. 105, emphasis in original). Through (re)clamation and a centering of “refugee”-ness, CRS uplifts and celebrates refugee subjectivities that are politically potent, agential, discrete, and distinct from citizens and some immigrant groups, though also more expansive and inclusive than legal definitions of “refugee” generally permit.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) defines a refugee as a person who

owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.

(UNHCR 2010)

CRS scholars critique “the refugee protection regime” founded on UNHCR’s legal definition, which, they argue, “anchors protection in a temporally and spatially restricted concept of fear” (Espiritu et al. 2022, p. 31, emphasis in original) that “dehistoricizes ongoing violence and discounts and erases the longue dureé” (ibid, p. 32)—the broader socio-political conditions precipitating dislocation and displacement worldwide over time. These situations may fall outside the definition of a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion” and may extend beyond acute conflict or war to also include generalized violence, extreme poverty, famine, injustice, environmental degradation, and climate crises. As a means of “situating and naming a critique” (Espiritu et al. 2022, p. 12) and “allowing the worlds of refugees to be evident, on their own terms, as much as possible” (ibid, p. 20, emphasis author’s), the Critical Refugee Studies Collective (CRSC) uses the term refugee to refer to

human beings forcibly displaced within or outside of their land of origin as a result of persecution, conflict, war, conquest, settler/colonialism, militarism, occupation, empire, and environmental and climate-related disasters, regardless of their legal status. Refugees can be self-identified and are often unrecognized within the limited definitions proffered by international and state laws.

(Espiritu et al. 2022, p. 72)

Many “refugees” identified through this CRSC definition, however, are recognized by legal entities such as UNHCR and the U.S. government as (im)migrants with asylum seeker, parolee, undocumented, or other non-citizenship and non-refugee legal statuses. Thus, a refugee/(im)migrant binary is established, a conceptual dichotomy Hamlin (2021) critiques as responsible for rhetorical arguments and policy tensions cultivated to divide—and support or condemn—individuals perceived as “voluntary (often economically motivated) migrants who can be legitimately excluded by potential host states and those viewed as forced (often politically motivated) refugees who should be let in” (p. 1). In brief, Hamlin asserts, this migrant/refugee binary, as she calls it, creates a system of “selective inclusion that is only possible through mass exclusion” (Hamlin 2021, p. 3) along a spectrum of “deservingness”.

Thinking with CRS about subjectivities and subject positioning, it can be argued that such categorization and differential treatment of refugee/(im)migrants pre-dates the 1951 Refugee Convention in the United States and is rooted in racialized, gendered, and settler colonial practices of division, power, and control. Early policies of immigration restriction within the United States, for example the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 or the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, produced a category of individual that looms large in the American imagination: the so-called illegal alien, “a new legal and political subject, whose inclusion within the nation was simultaneously a social reality and a legal impossibility–a subject barred from citizenship and without rights” (Ngai 2004, p. 4). In describing the United States’ “impossible subjects”, illegal aliens, as unassimilable (ibid, p. 8), Ngai articulates an inscription of “national membership and citizenship” that draws “lines of inclusion and exclusion that articulate a desired composition—imagined if not necessarily realized—of the nation” (ibid, p. 5), a particular racial formation rooted in white supremacy and premised on constructions of whiteness and racialized “other”. Ong (2003) notes that within the U.S. refugee/(im)migrant imaginary, there persists a tendency to position newcomers “along the continuum from black to white” and along intersectional axes of class and gender, to identify “degrees of undeserving or deserving citizenship” (p. 11). These become both moral claims (Ong 2003, pp. 10–14) and “common sense” hierarchies (Das Gupta 2006, p. 13), which serve to exclude and punish what Das Gupta refers to as “deviant subjects” who are economically necessary but socially and legally excluded. Das Gupta explains:

By using its constitutive force of sovereignty, the state hierarchically orders rights by codifying immigrants into categories of illegal, legal but nonresident, legal and resident but noncitizen, naturalized citizen, and native born. The legal nature of these distinctions normalizes the hierarchy, thereby making common sense the differential treatment of immigrants in these categories.

(ibid, p. 13)

Both at national and global levels—supported by the distinctions between refugee and non-refugee (im)migrants within the humanitarian-security nexus (Andersson 2017), or apparatus, that is the UNHCR, alongside nation-state governments—distinctions are made between un/deserving, un/belonging, and in/ex/cluded people on the move, to say nothing of Indigenous peoples around the world who have been “internally displaced” by settler colonialism, militarism, and other imperial projects that force their removal from ancestral lands—as in Guam, Palestine, and the United States, among countless other “nation-states”—who are largely invisibilized in these discussions of displacement and resettlement centered around refugee/(im)migrants (Espiritu Gandhi 2022).

Espiritu et al. (2022) point to “existing statutory bases of discrimination [that] create category crises for refugee law and policy” (p. 26). They also highlight the ways that “refugee law cannot account for the multiplicity and complexity of refugee-producing conditions and refugee claims” and, through CRS, work to “underscore refugees’ capacious and creative ways of seeking better conditions for living, even as they navigate colonial, state, structural, and legal violence” (Espiritu et al. 2022, p. 51). This is where many CRS scholars engage: centering the voices of refugee/(im)migrants and aiming to unsettle fixed notions of “the refugee” in order to re/claim power, authority, and agency for people on the move and displaced people who speak for themselves, across “archipelago[s] of resettlement” (Espiritu Gandhi 2022) and as activists within persistent conditions of “unsettlement” (Tang 2015), settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and imperialism.

In thinking with CRS about refugee/(im)migrant education, questions of labeling and identifying students are forefronted. CRS demands that questions be asked: Who is naming whom, when, where, why, and how? What does it matter and what matter(s)—policy, practice, or otherwise—does it (co)create? De Genova (2018) articulates how quickly “… the figure of the refugee—so recently fashioned as an object of European compassion, pity, and protection—was [or can be] re-fashioned with astounding speed … as the potential terrorist who surreptitiously infiltrates … [and] corrodes the social and moral fabric of Europe from within” (p. 1775). The category of “refugee” is re/produced to meet various socio-political needs of nation-states in each moment (Espiritu et al. 2022; Espiritu Gandhi 2022; Ong 2003). Schools regularly use deficit-oriented language to exclude, regulate, other, and surveille racialized refugee/(im)migrant students, along with other categories of racialized and marginalized students. CRS demands that refugee/(im)migrant education be read through the legal, historical, social, and political grids that have (co)created refugee/(im)migrants while also recognizing the ways refugee/(im)migrants are re/making those grids and education systems, themselves, as actors with agency and power.

CRS as a political project, situated within intra-related social justice research and theoretical projects, takes an identitarian and ontological stance both as a re/claiming of labels and a resistance to being labeled by oppressive and violent systems and events. CRS seeks to humanize displaced people without relying upon the human rights framework of liberal and neoliberal juridical and political projects (DeGooyer et al. 2018; Espiritu et al. 2022; Ong 2003; Vang 2021) and takes aim at neoliberal juridical systems and, by extension, neoliberal education reform movements that have divested public funds away from and devastated public education through regimes of standardization, testing, and accountability. CRS scholar Espiritu Ghandi (2022) diffractively reads her field through “archipe-logics”, defined as “discontinuous connections rather than physical proximity, fluid movements across porous margins rather than delimited borders, and complex spatial networks rather than the oblique horizons of landscapes—in sum, moving islands rather than fixed geographic formations” (p. 11, citing Thompson 2017). This points toward an unfixedness, mobility, transnationalism, and destabilization in thinking with, for, and about refugee/(im)migrants. It raises questions about the girding up of refugee/(im)migrant identity categories through socio-political and legal-historical gridded maps, as well as in relation to data collection and data-driven decision making in refugee/(im)migrant education. Bey (2022) asks a question perhaps relevant to a diffractive reading of CRS:

How might we degrid the cartographical maps that have been imposed not simply on but as our bodies? […] the strictures of having to be something? How can we, as Eliza Steinbock says of trans studies, remain in an indeterminate, non-fixed space and suspend the desire for retroactive installment of ourselves and others into the paradigmatic (racialized, gendered) grid?

(p. 27, emphasis in original)

This paper turns now to new materialism, critical feminist (science) studies, and critical posthumanism to consider refugee/(im)migrant education as a degridded becoming-with—not an entity already present and with material presence separate from matter(s) around it and co-constitutive of it—before looking at mo(ve)ment (Davies 2021) found in trans-ing refugee/(im)migrant education.

2.3. Quantum and New Materialist Theory: Intra-Active Entanglements in Refugee/(Im)Migrant Education

In sharp contrast to neoliberal conceptualizations of education, nation-state boundaries, and personhood, in which elements in/of refugee/(im)migrant education are treated as discrete and stable (the student, the teacher, the text, the test, the data, the funding, the policy) and as a complicating mechanism, or diffractive lens, for thinking about identity politics and the work of CRS, thinking rhizomatically (Deleuze and Guattari 1987)—through quantum, new materialist, critical posthumanist and critical feminist theory—about refugee/(im)migrant education opens exploration of “ontological indeterminacy, a radical openness, an infinity of possibilities … at the core of mattering” (Barad 2012b, p. 214). Rather than thinking of categories, identities, static matter, and matters (as problems), refugee/(im)migrant education might be considered a “becoming-with” (Haraway 2016, p. 12) or “making-with”, a sympoiesis (ibid, p. 5). What happens to refugee/(im)migrant education if, for example, one embraces the inherent discontinuities in the “quantum leap” that is, arguably, refugee/(im)migrant education: “the rupture itself that helps constitute the here’s and now’s, and not once and for all … that here-now, there-then have become unmoored: there’s no place or time for them to be” (Barad 2012a, p. 40), spacetimematterings6 and entanglements that are enfoldings of spacetimematterings (ibid, p. 41)? In these “unfinished configurations” (Haraway 2016, p. 1), one locates “phenomena-in-their-becoming … not tied to a temporality of futurity, but rather a radically open relatingness of the world worlding itself” (Barad 2012a, p. 46).

Through quantum and new materialist theorizations across fields,7 entanglement and intra-action (Barad 2003) have become—or more accurately are becoming(with)—central tenets highlighting that I/we, us/them, this/that are not simply intertwined with each other “as in the joining of separate entities”, but actually lack “an independent, self-contained existence … Existence is not an independent affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating” (Barad 2007, p. ix). This is extended to systems as well, including education systems that are understood as assemblages and “events” that are “continually constituted from the more-than-human ‘affects’ … between human and non-human matter” (Fox 2023, p. 1), in other words as “becoming-with[s]” (Haraway 2016, p. 12) or co-constituting intra-actions:

The notion of intra-action (in contrast to the usual ‘interaction’, which presumes the prior existence of independent entities/relate) represents a profound conceptual shift. It is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the ‘components’ of phenomena become determinate and that particular embodied concepts become meaningful.

(Barad 2003, p. 815)

Hence, the idea of “refugee/(im)migrant” is not a fixed, knowable, discrete, or pre-existing identity, matter, or subject position, nor is education, school, teaching, learning, or anything else found in the assemblage that is refugee/(im)migrant education. Its “boundaries and properties” are co-created intra-actively with laws, nation-state borders, policies, performative acts, multiple peoples and agencies, various documents, curricular and pedagogical materials and practices, and so much more: “an endless cascade of material interactions that together produce both the natural and the social world and human history” (Fox 2023, p. 3). This co-constituting matter forces consideration not of what something is but rather what it does and “what are its relational capacities?” (Fox 2023, p. 3).

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) assert that “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be” (p. 7), just as any point, human or otherwise, in refugee/(im)migrant education can be connected to any other, and must be. Thinking rhizomatically also means thinking within multiplicities, as opposed to singularities and unity(ies), another essential feature of refugee/(im)migrant education:

There is no unity to serve as a pivot in the object or to divide in the subject. There is not even the unity to abort in the object or ‘return’ to in the subject. A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature.

(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 8)

In this indefinite terrain, full of qualifiers (some versus one or all), there is rupture that serves as productive terrain against the dichotomous or binary—the refugee and the im/migrant, for example, or the teacher and the student—and as “lines of flight”; “lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees” (ibid, p. 9). Thus, quantum, new materialist, and critical feminist and posthuman considerations of refugee/(im)migrant education—as rhizomatic and intraactive—present “a map and not a tracing” (ibid, p. 12) and provoke exploration and discovery.

Barad suggests that “mattering is simultaneously a matter of substance and significance” (Barad 2007, p. 3); the “map” of refugee/(im)migrant education then might best be understood as a material-discursive object and, as evidenced in the previous discussion of both neoliberal and CRS (co)constructions of refugee/(im)migrant education, it has socio-political implications. Barad (2007) introduces “agential realism” within a “diffractive” methodology which allows one to “cut things together-apart (as one movement)” (Barad 2012a, p. 32). Agential realism, as Barad (2007) theorizes, “advances a new materialist understanding of naturalcultural practices” (p. 226) in which “the forces at work in the materialization of bodies are not only social and the bodies produced are not all human” (Barad 2007, p. 225). Thinking of phenomena as “ontologically primitive relations—relations without pre-existing relata” (ibid, p. 333), Barad describes agential cuts within a diffractive analytical and theoretical method:

A specific intra-action (involving a specific material configuration of the “apparatus”) enacts an agential cut (in contrast to the Cartesian cut—an inherent distinction—between subject and objects), effecting a separation between “subject” and “object”. That is, the agential cut enacts a resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological (and semantic) indeterminacy. In other words, relata do not preexist relations; rather, relata-within-phenomena emerge through specific intra-actions.

(ibid, p. 334, emphasis in original)

In this methodology8—a critical reading, thinking, measurement, and analytical practice—refugee/(im)migrant education, inclusive of teaching, learning, policymaking, and financing, among other intra-activities, is (re)created with each “agential cut”, emerging from the apparatus (evaluative tool, policy lens, research project, data set, classroom lesson) in use and the relations, or intra-actions among the matter(s)—human and other-than-human—coming to matter in a particular spacetimemattering. Through diffraction, I/we, researchers/practitioners/policymakers/activists/learners, attend and respond to “the details and specificities of relations of difference and how they matter” (Barad 2007, p. 71) here/there and then/now. Understanding differences that matter by means of cutting “together-apart” through diffractive methodologies and in refugee/(im)migrant education is a means of (re)thinking teaching and learning intra-actively with human and other-than-human matter—including data, policies and laws, technologies, DEI initiatives, curriculum, cultural and linguistic practices, borders, etc.—that matters.

Hickey-Moody et al. (2016) describe a diffractive pedagogy with the “the potential of non-representationalist, ‘diffractive’ thinking” (p. 214, emphasis in original). They argue that “as researchers and as teachers, we are implicated in the enmeshing of bodies and environments, creation and thought, scripts and identities” (Hickey-Moody et al. 2016, p. 226). If refugee/(im)migrant education is understood as intra-active entanglements and co-constituting becoming-with, dominant research, policy, and practice paradigms are unsettled, and explorations of “refugee/(im)migrant” and “education” must be considered as material-discursive configurings, becoming-with, that act intra-actively and what do they do? What are their “relational capacities” (Fox 2023, p. 3), thinking with new materialists? What are their political functions, affordances, and constraints, thinking with social justice scholars and practitioners? What are their transitive—and transformational—powers? This paper takes one final turn in this diffractive analysis to consider refugee/(im)migrant education as trans—transnational, translanguaging, transworlding, transgressive, transformative—as over and across, in mo(ve)ment (Davies 2021), intra-actively creating possibilities to teach and learn other/wise.

2.4. Trans Theories and Refugee/(Im)Migrant Education: Moving Subjects and Subjectivities

Trans, as a prefix, references movement across, through, or over. It is, arguably, a central concept in refugee/(im)migrant education. Trans, as a political subjectivity, is “about practice and process rather than arrival at a singular point of ‘liberation’” for people identifying as trans (Spade 2015, p. 2), and trans*epistemology is an opening of possibilities (Nicolazzo 2021, p. 531). Bey (2022), in theorizing Black trans feminism, suggests looking beyond ontological and epistemological positions, asserting that “identity rests upon an assumptive coherence, knowability, and nonporousness, all of which are regulated, normative regimes of legibility and stability” (p. 37). Trans studies, and more specifically Black trans feminism, are of relevance to thinking, differently, with students and families of refugee/(im)migrant backgrounds, their teachers and other education leaders, researchers, and other interested parties, about liberatory processes and expansive possibilities in refugee/(im)migrant education.

The “trans”-ing of refugee/(im)migrant education has taken root through—or, more accurately, perhaps, is rhizomatically connected and intra-actively becoming-with—ongoing discussions of translanguaging and transworlding. Translanguaging is articulated as “the deployment of a speaker’s full linguistic repertoire without regard for watchful adherence to the socially and politically defined boundaries of named (and usually national and state) languages” (Otheguy et al. 2015, p. 281) and as “the flexible use of linguistic resources by bilinguals in order to make sense of their worlds” (García and Leiva 2014, p. 200). Translanguaging is conceived of as a unitary practice or “idiolect” (Otheguy et al. 2015, p. 638), although it may be more fully understood and actualized if thought of in terms of the rhizomatic and the intra-actions of lines of flight: language lines in flight. The construction of knowledge is viewed as “enactive”, as generated by individuals in dynamic and creative ways not in response to a “pre-given world that can be decomposed into … fragments” but rather in an ongoing process of becoming and of languaging (García and Leiva 2014, pp. 201–2). Translanguaging is understood as emerging from “an assemblage” of “diverse semiotic resources” (Canagarajah 2017, p. 9), “a complex of mobile resources, shaped and developed both because of mobility, by people moving around, and for mobility, to enable people to move around” (Blackledge and Creese 2017, p. 32). As theorized by Thibault (2017), “A languaging agent is … a system that recursively self-individuates by tapping into and sustaining potentials—bodily, situation, circumstantial, social, cultural—by manufacturing semantic syntheses in its utterance-activity as it seeks solutions to the problematics that it encounters in its world” (p. 77, emphasis added), entangled and becoming-with. Translanguaging allows for a “complex interweaving of languages and language varieties, and where boundaries between languages, between languages and other communicative means, and the relationship between language and the nation-state are being constantly reassessed, broken, or adjusted by speakers on the ground” (Wei 2018, p. 15).

Translanguaging, a complex practice in refugee/(im)migrant education, is tied to “transworlding” (Koyama 2020), a theorization that builds upon and departs from the notion of “worlding” set forth by Spivak (1985), as summarized by Daza (2013), who applies Spivak’s theory to the study of education:

Worlding is the power to inscribe the world and to cover up its practices of colonizing even in its expansion. Worlding determines how one conceives of the world and one’s relationships in it. Worlding shapes values and how subjects think, act, and reason. Worlding is to appropriate and reappropriate what is—knowledge, power, norms, common sense, and nonsense.

(p. 610)

Koyama (2020) argues that worlding is normative and aims to go unnoticed as it becomes naturalized, normalized, and prescriptive. In contrast, transworlding is a traversing—a disruption of worlding—in which individuals reject, in favor of something more fluid and toward unknown and unknowable liberatory trans-ing potential. Transworlding is unregulated, variously represented, and multiply enacted. Koyama and Kasper (2022) define transworlding as the practice of mediating emergent identities and navigating “figured worlds” (Holland et al. 1998) of refugee learning while challenging normative and marginalizing educational practices. Transworlding describes how resettled refugee/(im)migrant students juxtapose and integrate learning in the U.S. with knowing and learning in spaces and cultures—other figured worlds—they have previously inhabited, and continue to access, even from across the globe, in spacetimemattering that shatters notions of linearity, chronology, and bounded nation-states. In this way, transworlding references movement and moments—Davies’ (2021) “mo(ve)ment”—of becoming-with, intra-actively, space, time, and matter.

This quantum understanding of “matter and materiality as not to be equated with mere being, a transparent and unmediated facticity of ‘the body’” is important, argues Bey (2022, p. 8). In thinking with Barad, Bey calls for

… an abandonment of how “matter” and materiality are commonly understood in favor of a joyous disposition toward the tinkering and playing with how materialization has and can occur differently. There is an ongoing agency to materiality, thus processes of materialization, what we come to understand as matter, are glimpsed in the transness and transing of matter.

(Bey 2022, p. 8)

This mobility and the transitory “states” of student, teacher, principal, school, curriculum, and testing “matter” can be glimpsed in the tinkering with data and with policy, among other matters, that education leaders, researchers, school board members, and funders use to make sense of, identify problems, and find solutions in refugee/(im)migrant education and schooling more broadly. This, but not only this, matters in a trans*epistemology and, most certainly, much more than this matter that matters is found in a trans*ethico-onto-epistemology. Bey (2022) theorizes that in the transing of matter, matter “does things”; it

is not merely lying in wait to be acted upon; matter is a performative metaphysics that is not a latent thing but an agential doing, a performativity that rebels underneath and to the side of, not against, a preexistence and moves with the force of desedimentation.

(p. 42)

Reading this diffractively, through and with critical refugee studies scholarship and critical feminist/new materialist/posthuman theory, centers refugee/(im)migrant students as active rather than passive be-ings, becoming-with intra-actively in education systems, schools, classrooms, and communities. It situates refugee/(im)migrant education as a “force of desedimentation”, potentially, with transformative power.

Refugee/(im)migrants are often situated in narratives of violence and trauma in U.S. education systems and broader socio-political contexts (e.g., Pupavac 2008; Rodriguez 2015; Sigona 2014), and many have, in fact, lived through horrific events, including but not limited to war, persecution, hunger, fear, loss of loved ones, displacement, and/or statelessness. However, people who have experienced this violence are also more than this violence. Bey (2022) cautions against “pointing to the violated lives (and deaths) of black trans women” (p. 6), as this limits the ways they can be and become in the world. Thinking about refugee/(im)migrant experience—transing refugee/(im)migrant experience—with/through Bey leads to “a fundamental commitment to life and livability … dwelling in the generative rubble after the oft-mentioned end of the world” (Bey 2022, p. 6). Haraway (2016) alerts us to the fact that “the edge of extinction is not just a metaphor, system collapse is not a thriller. Ask any refugee of any species” (p. 102). Transitions and transformations, in transitory spacetimematterings, are part and parcel of—becoming-with—schooling and education, and (re)configure hope in the rubble, in the compost (Haraway 2016), or in the collapse of standardized, data-driven systems that label, position, erase, celebrate, exempt, and exclude.

As noted earlier, within these systems there are questions of legibility, or clarity, around people with refugee/(im)migrant experience, legal status, and/or identification in education. Legible (normative) “data” are hard to find, or rather define, in meaningful ways. “Transparency” and accountability are difficult to achieve and are questioned or troubled as “a schema of intelligibility” in which “one must always have the breadth of their subjectivity reduced” (Bey 2022, p. 10). Considering this through a lens, rather, of “opacity”—as put forward by Glissant (1997) and as mobilized by Bey—forces researchers, educators, policymakers, and others invested in “the refugee student” to question the need to know, capture, and name. Bey speaks of this in relation to blackness and transness and through a lens of ethically vital privacy: “a tactical evasion that eludes medicalized, biometric, and regulatory frameworks of ‘knowing’ a subject” (Bey 2022, p. 10). Bey argues that opacity is

a vehicle precisely for the eradication of those differentiations that are, at base, violences structured and created by forces of hegemony […] an identity imposed—a “given ontology”—that, ultimately […] must be discarded because of its link to being forged in a cauldron of originary violence.

(ibid, p. 10)

Building on Glissant’s conceptualization that “opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics”, Bey (2022) argues that opacity is “radically inclusive” (p. 11) and is ever-shifting and in movement, a creative force “not simply given or possessed ontologically” (p. 11). Thinking diffractively through this and about refugee/(im)migrant education, questions arise: When are students and families seen or identified as refugee/(im)migrant, why, and how? When is there opacity and what does that afford and/or constrain? How is “refugee/(im)migrant” co-constructed or, more accurately, intra-actively becoming-with/through/in schools, curriculum, funding, community, policy, etc.? Do current “gaps” in data create radical possibilities for refugee/(im)migrant education as a co-constituting element of and diffractive lens within education ecosystems?

Bey (2022) theorizes Black trans feminism as an “intrareverberations” (p. 41). It is worth quoting at length what this means or, rather, does for them. Bey calls for placing “importance” on

affiliation and commitment to insurgent forms of life, rather than an exclusionary limning of boundary, because it concerns itself with how we interact with one another via an open critical posture […] a sociality-in-differentiation, one that is not possessed natally and ad infinitum; a ‘sociality without exclusion’, as J. Kameron Carter and Sarah Jane Cervenak would have it […] the fashioning of subjectivities formed through a desire […] to be held, but such a holding is an encompassing openness that eases but does not contain. I want to express some kind of subjectivity that allows for us to be loved and embraced without, and as a rejection of, fixing us, limiting or knowing us in totality, without stalling movement as a means to manufacture commonality and legibility. The holding, which is always a facilitator of rather than impediment to our movement, in fact lets us come together instead of being brought together.

(Bey 2022, p. 41, emphasis in original)

Thinking with Black trans feminism and its expanded trans*ethico-onto-epistemology, multiple possibilities are becoming(with)(in) refugee/(im)migrant education. What comes together if refugee/(im)migrant-ness—and education, too—is trans-ed, held lightly, with love and openness rather than with foreclosures, fixity, limitations, and/or knowing “once and for all” (Barad 2012a, p. 40)?

3. Findings: Co-Constituting Configurations in/of Refugee/(Im)Migrant Education and Differences in/of the Matter(s) That Matter(s)

Refugee/(im)migrant education is full of matter (material) and matters (issues) that matter. As has been argued throughout, however, “being put in a box says little about how one occupies that box and how others relate to that box” (Bey 2022, p. 17). This paper has attempted to consider a refugee/(im)migrant education “box” and unpack, expand, and call into question the discrete existence of that box. What has emerged are co-constituting forces acting agentially in fields of matter that include schools, policies, curricula, data, families, students, teachers, school and district leaders, playgrounds, cafeterias, and so much more, in spacetimes that are marked by displacement, exclusion, legal citizenship/refugee/(im)migrant categories, erasure, hope, and possibility.

Across the four material-discursive fields presented, or rather through (intra)active use of these material-discursive apparatuses, refugee/(im)migrant education is diffracted as a means of “attending to entanglements in reading important insights and approaches through one another” (Barad 2007, p. 30) in a “process whereby a difference is made” (Davies 2021, p. 66). The apparatus(es) used produce(s) the pattern seen or made sense of; in other words, refugee/(im)migrant education takes shape (and shapeshifts) depending on the tool(s) used to explore and intra-actively (co)create it. Davies (2021), building on the work of Barad (2007), describes diffraction as follows:

like two waves meeting in the ocean, responding to each other, changing the shape and direction of each other, but it is not just about these forces intra-acting. Each wave is more than itself, intra-acting with forces larger than itself, the moon, the sun, the body of the ocean, the seasons, the surface of the ocean floor, and a multitude of smaller forces inside-outside itself such that there can be no clear demarcation between wave and not-wave.

(pp. 63–64)

Barad (2007) reminds us that “diffraction effects are attentive to fine detail […] consider the fact that the details of diffraction patterns depend on the details of the apparatus” (p. 91). This paper diffracts refugee/(im)migrant education through four, not two or three, paradigms, and this changes the patterns that (co)create differences in the matter. These differences, of course, matter. Data-driven decision making (DDDM) and neoliberalism, critical refugee studies (CRS), new materialism and critical posthumanism, and trans theories and Black trans feminism intra-actively shape refugee/(im)migrant education and are also shaped by thinking about and with refugee/(im)migrant education. These apparatuses, themselves, are “material-discursive practices—causal intra-actions through which matter is iteratively and differentially articulated, reconfiguring the material-discursive field of possibilities and impossibilities in the ongoing dynamics of intra-activity that is agency” (Barad 2007, p. 170). Through this intra-activity and the bending, curving diffraction of matter(s), refugee/(im)migrant education becomes “a question posed but not resolved” (Bey 2022; citing Butler 1994, p. 239 fn38) and interested parties are called into attending to the details of the apparatus in use—theoretical, political, statistical, pedagogical, or otherwise—and the difference(s) made.

Interested parties, actors in refugee/(im)migrant education as a co-constitutive force in transnational education ecosystems, are also called into consideration of the “agential cuts” they make and the implications of those cuts. What are our responsibilities and commitments (Barad 2007, p. xi; 2012a, p. 47) in a refugee/(im)migrant education assemblage in which “making a difference is having the capacity to interfere” (Kirby 2011, p. 154)? This diffractive writing/reading—pulling together and apart all in one mo(ve)ment—raises questions that cannot be, perhaps, resolved, but which must be considered in an ethico-onto-epistemological orientation:

… an appreciation of the intertwining of ethics, knowing, and being—since each intra-action matters, since the possibilities for what the world may become call out in the pause that precedes each breath before a moment comes into being and the world is remade again, because the becoming of the world is a deeply ethical matter.

(Barad 2007, p. 185)

Thinking ethico-onto-epistemologically requires asking which diffractive lens is in use, as well as when, where, why, and by whom? What are the affordances and constraints of that paradigm, apparatus, or material-discursive practice? What is being (re/co)constituted through that work? What is going in and what is coming out in a process of (re/co)constitution that is matter-ing? As this paper attempts to illustrate, each choice (agential cut) made in thinking about, with, and through refugee/(im)migrant education shapes the patterns of difference: both the matter that matters and the matters that matter.

4. Conclusions: Education in Mo(ve)ment

What happens when the starting point in refugee/(im)migrant education is that everything is dynamic, intra-active, shape-shifting, (re/co)constituting, becoming-with, suspended, and full of suspense rather than static, fixed, discrete, definable, and measurable? What “relational capacities” (Fox 2023) does this hold for refugee/(im)migrant education and the many human and other-than-human actors that configure, and regularly reconfigure, refugee/(im)migrant education? It is here, in these rhizomatic entanglements of radically open relating(ness), that possibility resides, a possibility previously foreclosed by narrowed and narrowing conceptualizations of refugee/(im)migrant education as a “thing” here, now, and once and for all that must be measured and understood: a problem to be solved. The key, perhaps, is to displace “being for becoming” (Bey 2022, p. 50) and to refuse “to be bordered” (ibid, p. 57).

Critically, at a time when displacement is on the rise globally (UNHCR 2023b) and every educator and every education system must be prepared to build upon the talents and experience of transnational, translanguaging, and transworlding students and families, it is imperative that education, itself, be reconstituted as a deterritorialized and unsettled practice (Leonardo 2019). Leonardo, thinking with and through the work of Said (2000), argues that “seen through the prism of exile, refugee students and their families turn precarity into conditions of possibility” (Leonardo 2019, p. 1) and “exile is a mode of existing in the world that reminds the educator of its incompleteness, interconnectedness, and openness” (ibid, p. 2). Refugee/(im)migrant education, an “education of movement” in and through exile (ibid, p. 1), is an intra-active sympoeisis, or becoming-with, that makes discovery of co-constituting processes in education visible. It calls all implicated and co-constituting actors into taking a close (detailed) look at what materializes as matter that matters through each diffractive lens and in each diffractive turn, including when, by whom, where, how, and why. Educators, policymakers, researchers, activists, and others implicated in the (re/co)creation of refugee/(im)migrant education in and through each intra-active mo(ve)ment are called into care—radical care (Hobart and Kneese 2020)—for all matter(s) in their trans-(languaging) (national) (gressive) (porting) (formative) potentialities and into taking care as they point, name, measure and, thus, transform each other. New materialist and Black trans feminist articulations and understandings of the co-constituting, intra-active becoming-withs of refugee/(im)migrant education calls actors to “explore and explain power and resistance not in unobserved ‘social structures’ or underlying ‘mechanisms’ but in the more-than-human assemblages of everyday interactions and events”—“it requires us to model power and resistance as continually generated within a messy, heterogeneous and emergent social world” (Fox 2023, pp. 3–4).

Refugee/(im)migrant education emerges through—and because of—relationalities and intra-actions among multiple transdisciplinary theoretical explorations and imaginings, illustrating “a causal relationship between specific exclusionary practices embodied as specific material configurations of the world (i.e., discursive practices/(con)figurations rather than ‘words’) and specific material phenomena (i.e., relations rather than ‘things’)”—what Barad (2003) terms “agential intra-action” (p. 814). Bey (2022), in thinking about a world after abolition and amid gender radicality, suggests a potentiality that holds significant implications for co-constituting peoples, policies, and practices in refugee/(im)migrant education. They write:

It is possible, though, that […] we can be held insofar as we are embraced by that which does not know us and, in this unknowing, truly loves and caresses us. Think: we might be anything at all, something wildly other than what we are, and in order to give in to that we need to be encountered by a world that really, actually, truly holds and loves us by never, ever presuming to know what shape we will take, what we will want, before we show up.

(p. 6)

If educators, researchers, policymakers, activists, and other actors extend this embrace and this expansive love to children, youth, and families who traverse the globe—in exile, displacement, promise, and hope—what might our education systems be, or rather what are they already becoming as this thought is (co)articulated and diffracted through the material and methods (matter) intra-actively and diffractively matter-ing in this paper?