Storied Lives: Narratives of Displacement and Resettlement of Young Syrian Refugee Children in Toronto, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Resettlement of refugees, especially young children, generally conceptualised within a framework of mental health and trauma, is reframed in this creative arts-based dissertation as interdependent, relational, participatory, fluid and a dynamic lived experience. Even though the new sociology of childhood has firmly established young children as experts of their own lives, and capable of engaging in narratives from their perspectives (James & Prout, 1990a; Mayall, 2002; Spyrou, 2018), the voices of young refugee children are missing or embedded within adult narratives (Archambault, 2012; Dona & Veale, 2011). The resettlement experiences of these children, usually defined through the agency/vulnerability binary, often projects them as traumatised, weak, vulnerable and sans agency (Sirin & Rogers-Sirin, 2015). This project not only addresses a gap regarding lack of studies conducted with young refugee children in Canadian contexts (Ali & Jibran, 2020), but also draws on Black feminist (Collins, 2000) and childhood studies (Mayall, 2002; Spyrou, 2018) to reimagine and trouble the agency/vulnerability binary within the context of their lived experiences of resettlement. Sixteen Syrian refugee children (ages 6-12 years) and 8 mothers from 8 families living in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) participated alongside the researcher and an interpreter during three research encounters, using creative, arts-based, multivocal and participatory research techniques. In addition, eight educators working with refugee children participated in semi-structured interviews. Placing relationality as central to understanding children’s lived experiences of resettlement, this project creates a space for children to make meaning along with adults (parents and educators), siblings and peers. Situating ethical reflexivity as central to this social justice project, data was generated and analysed using Black feminist, Enabling and Mosaic methodologies. A methodology of witnessing, described as ethical, political, and relational ways of participating in knowledge construction through storytelling was employed in analyses of what refugee children did in homes, communities and schools, with families, peers and educators during resettlement. The project explored children’s narratives of i) pre-migration experiences and community encounters in the GTA ii) roles within and interactions with family during resettlement and iii) relationship building with peers and educators in Canadian schools. This research proposes that it is essential to reimagine the concepts of agency and vulnerability to look beyond suffering and trauma and transcend binaries of oppression and resistance. Valuing marginalized knowledges and situated realities, this project hopes to address the injustice perpetuated by normalcy and universality of the refugee experience.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".