Date of Award

6-26-2026

Date Published

August 2026

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Cultural Foundations of Education

Advisor(s)

Eunjung Kim

Keywords

critical disability studies;critical pedagogy;critical refugee studies;education;refugee youth;YPAR

Subject Categories

Educational Sociology | Social and Behavioral Sciences | Sociology

Abstract

This dissertation examines how refugee youth in Malaysia understand, experience, and reimagine education and freedom within a socio-political context that denies them legal recognition, mobility, access to public education, opportunities for legal employment, and affordable healthcare. As Malaysia is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, refugees are not formally recognized by the state. Situating itself within refugee education scholarship and drawing on transnational feminism, critical refugee studies, critical disability studies, and queer theory, this study centers refugee youth as knowledge producers, interrogates dominant narratives of refugee youth, and challenges the conventional approaches to refugee education in order to reimagine alternative futures. Using feminist decolonial methodologies and qualitative methods, this study was conducted between 2023 and 2025, including spending 14 months at a refugee learning center in Kuala Lumpur, where I served as an instructor for two 16-week videography classes. In addition, I facilitated five small-group film discussions followed by semi-structured interviews. Participants were recruited both from the classes and through snowball sampling. Through storytelling, critical discourse analysis (CDA), and narrative analysis, I examined how refugee youth articulate meaningful forms of education, negotiate language and identity, and engage in community-building and solidarity. This approach foregrounds refugee youth’s epistemic knowledge and everyday survival strategies within broader structures of nation-states, globalization, and colonial legacies, while also laying the groundwork for future youth participatory action research (YPAR). Findings reveal that refugee youth understand education not merely as a pathway to social mobility, but as a political practice of survival and belonging in their everyday lives. Their narratives complicate dominant frameworks that treat refugee education as a temporary response to crisis, while simultaneously demonstrating that learning occurs both inside and outside the classroom and is deeply tied to their pursuit of freedom. Through this analysis, I develop the concept of “camouflagic life” to theorize how refugee youth navigate systems that deny their existence through strategies of mimicry, concealment, and adaptation, while generating alternative understandings of freedom, solidarity, and resistance. While camouflagic life underscores refugee youth’s agency and makes visible the operations of power, it remains limited in its capacity for structural transformation under conditions of legal and social exclusion. By centering refugee youth’s voice, this study contributes to refugee education scholarship in transit countries such as Malaysia and offers critical insights for educators, researchers, and advocates seeking to pursue education as an emancipatory, justice-oriented practice.

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Open Access

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