Futures and Temporal Strategies in Refugee Higher Education

Based on the desk work of policy review and accounts provided by Syrian students and educational project administrators in 2018–2019 in Lebanon and Jordan, this chapter provides insights into “the future” in scholarship programmes and students’ experiences and responses in relation to the future. It traces scholarship programmes and their changing future that is projected onto refugee young people as the crisis protracted. While place-bound futures of return and employment in the host countries continue to occupy the agenda of funders, talks of innovative, entrepreneurs’ “open” futures also emerge as a strategic way to maintain imaginations and hope. Refugee students likewise continue to engage with punctuated and short-term educational (and supposedly “developmental”) opportunities in the absence of more meaningful ways to engage with the visions of a long-term future. Students negotiate waiting and uncertainty by keeping mobile not only in spatial and virtual terms but also in temporal terms. One remains busy and maintains an outlook towards an “open future” in order to stay in hope. While critiquing crisis-informed and periodical scholarship programmes, the chapter argues that attention to temporality in refugee education may help us to understand the unexpected use and vital role of educational opportunities under extremely uncertain circumstances.