Paper details
| Paper authors | AYŞE DURAN YILMAZ |
| In panel on | ‘Real’ Humanitarian Governance: Accountability, Advocacy, and Alternatives |
| Paper presenter(s) will be presenting |
In-Person / |
Abstract
Humanitarian narratives have long positioned refugee children as figures of crisis—vulnerable, traumatized, and in need of urgent intervention. While these portrayals often stem from well-meaning intentions, they also operate within broader regimes of epistemic control and pedagogical normalization. This paper critically examines how refugee childhoods are discursively constructed in humanitarian crisis frameworks, particularly within institutional reports and global early childhood policy documents issued by organizations such as UNICEF and UNHCR.
Grounded in the analysis of institutional texts and humanitarian education frameworks, this study offers a critical reading of how refugee childhoods are constructed through policy discourse. It interrogates how refugee children are represented emotionally (as wounded), cognitively (as developmentally delayed), and politically (as future citizens in need of integration). These portrayals, I argue, reduce the complexity of refugee children lived experiences and render them manageable subjects within a depoliticized humanitarian logic.
Building on decolonial theory (Spivak, Mignolo), critical childhood studies (Zelizer, Spyrou), and the concept of symbolic power (Bourdieu), the analysis reveals how humanitarian discourse contributes to an “epistemic management” of refugee childhood—where the child’s subjectivity is shaped not by voice or agency, but by crisis-induced expectations of recovery, resilience, and normativity.
This paper extends critiques of humanitarianism by asking: What kinds of childhoods are made intelligible through crisis narratives? What pedagogical futures are imagined for refugee children, and at what cost? In doing so, it calls for representational justice and epistemic disobedience in how refugee children are theorized, narrated, and responded to—within and beyond humanitarian education.
