Governing Refugee Education Through Waiting: Temporality and Agency in Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Minors’ Narratives of (Dis)engagement with Schooling

In utilising a governmentality of migration and temporality theoretical lens, the paper illuminates the technologies of power, regimes of practices and rationalities that govern refugee educational reception, drawing upon a British Academy-funded study that documented unaccompanied asylum-seeking children’s lived experiences in Southern European borderlands. Through an ethnographically informed research design that involved observations, interviews and focus groups conducted in two reception centres for unaccompanied minors in Greece, the paper examines their (dis)engagement with schooling, locating it at the interface of asylum and educational regimes and their respective temporalities. The participants’ accounts, situated in the liminal context of asylum-seeking, illustrate the challenges they face with respect to access, reception and inclusive learning (or lack thereof) and the intricate ways that power, agency and temporality are interwoven in their narratives. Notwithstanding the educators’ well-intentioned efforts, schools amplify the profound uncertainty characterising unaccompanied minors’ lives, with waiting emerging as a technology of power through which their engagement with schooling is governed, and often resisted, poignantly pointing to the ambivalence of refugee educational reception and its exclusionary operation.