Unsettling Narratives, Reflecting on Policy and Intersectional Practice

This chapter explores the idea of university space as an avenue for critically exploring policy and legal biases, situated practice and approaches to comparative thinking around displacement and borders. It probes into approaches to teaching and thinking in relation to colonial violence in the reproduction of power, gender, race and class relations; and problems with—but also the need for—lenses that compare and contrast different countries’ experiences as well as differentiated struggles within countries. The chapter presents some of the curriculum possibilities that may be deployed to address (mis)understandings of displacement experiences and governance regimes, engaging arguments for counter-colonial and intersectional lenses. Among the topics addressed are the so-called “Safe Third Country Agreement” (e.g. linking Canada and the United States, but also elsewhere), an arrangement used to strip displaced people of rights if they temporarily spend time in one country before seeking asylum in another. We also discuss pedagogy around other failures of state systems to generate non-discriminatory responses to insecurity; and the production of policy regimes that deprive people of rights to work or rights to move. By bringing these various policy realms in reflections together, the chapter calls for appreciation of (a) the dangers of de-historicising and (b) challenges to unsettling hegemonic policy narratives—that become fixed to particular ideas of what is and what could be.