Displacement and Racial Bordering: What Next for Higher Education?

While it is no secret that politicians are employing racist anti-migrant rhetoric in political strategies, the ambiguous role of universities is much less evident. Some university activities in the UK are co-opted into violent state logics of xenophobic racism by acting as “border” controls for the UK Home Office—monitoring and reporting on international students. Other aspects of university complicities can be theorised in relation to acts of silence in the midst of injustice. Additional forms of complicity may lurk in the stereotypes and false representations of different parts of the world, which may be perpetuated in university policies and course curricula even despite the very best intentions. These problems may reside even despite the use of nuanced theories and curricula strategies that wholeheartedly seek to learn from oppressed populations. This chapter reviews some of the critical literature on different aspects of university co-optation as well as anti-colonial challenges that may be advanced against contemporary practices of racial bordering. Bringing together conversations from feminist migration and displacement studies, anti-colonial border studies and education and critical curriculum studies, we provide a preliminary account of sensibilities we sought to cultivate with students in the “Displacement and Development” course, taught at the University of Edinburgh with students from more than two dozen countries, as well as some of the dilemmas encountered. We then describe the methodology of our project, involving interviews, reflexive engagement on our classroom experiences and approaches, and consideration of alternatives (what we didn’t do and might have done). The course covered diverse topics—from the intersectional politics and implications of changes to refugee protection systems to the framing of climate-related displacement and the politics of “development-induced” displacement as well as migration responses in various parts of the planet (with a particular emphasis in African settings)—all interrelated in global systems of contestation and change. The chapter engages arguments that invite reflections merging geopolitical contexts, intellectual genealogies and situated pedagogies. It offers background to the approach to writing that we adopt, as a collective, with individual reflective components that share elements of our positionality in approaching teaching and reflection on displacement and borders.