Ahıska Refugee Families’ Configuration of Resettlement and Academic Success in U.S. Schools

Abstract

In this article, we report on an ethnographic study of figured worlds of resettlement and identities that Muslim refugee youth from the Russian Federation coconstructed in an urban school at the Southwestern U.S. border. In the school, multiple cultural-historical discourses came together within a glocal context: refugee families, a global Islamic movement, and deficit-oriented educational ideologies. Three empirically derived themes emerged: Glocal adaptation, multiple literacies, and sticking together. The overall impact of this study derives from two aspects of the analysis: The cultural-historical analysis of refugee resettlement and the hybrid identities of refugee students.