No one leaves home unless

home is the mouth of a shark

These are the words of Somali-British writer, Warsan Shire (2015), written in her poem, Home, a poem that goes on to insist:

you have to understand,

that no one puts their children in a boat

unless the water is safer than the land

This symposium takes this call to understand as its starting point and its guiding inspiration. But how are we to understand, to live with, and to educate people who have been uprooted from their homes? Before all else, what does it mean to describe these persons as ‘refugees’? We can look to international law for guidance here, to the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees that, over 70 years ago, first officially defined a ‘refugee’ as a person forced to leave their homeland due to a ‘well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion’ (UN General Assembly, 1951). It is also possible to locate a refugee among those 82.4 million people who, by the end of 2020, were uprooted by force from their homes (UNHCR, 2021). Equally, we know that a refugee can be idented alongside the 20.7 million persons from across the world who, by the end of the same year, were (under the mandate of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees) counted as refugees (UNHCR, 2021). And yet, beyond these statistics we might, with Shire (2015) acknowledge the lived experience of being uprooted one’s home. Indeed, the philosopher, Simone Weil (1952, p. 41), once observed: ‘To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul’. And it is to complexities of identity, belonging and inclusion that the papers that make up this symposium attend as they examine the exclusion, along with possibilities for the inclusion, of displaced young people. For all the immense social, political, and economic pressures they confront, it is the unifying contention of these papers that inclusive educational institutions have a significant role in countering trauma experienced by, and the hostility directed towards, persons defined as ‘immigrants’ or ‘refugees’.

Shire, W. (2015) Home. Available: https://seekersguidance.org/articles/social-issues/home-warsan-shire/ Weil, S. (1952) The Need for Roots, trans. A. F. Wills (New York, NY: Routledge). UN General Assembly. (1951). Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, 28 July 1951. United Nations, Treaty Series, vol. 189. Accessed 16 January 2019: https://www.refworld.org/docid/3be01b964.html. UNHCR. (2021). Figures at a Glance. Accessed July 20, 2021: https://www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-glance.html.