Global attention has turned to  the education of both refugee and disabled students in the past decades. Supranational and national policies prescribe obligations to these student groups, and mandate their inclusion in education. But both refugee students and disabled students find themselves at the nexus of seemingly contradictory policy imperatives – inclusion on the one hand, and on the other, the competitive and performative global standards agenda. Often there is reluctance to accommodate either non-standard new arrivals or those with disabilities who are positioned as outliers in economic measures of school performance. Refugee education and disability education are separated in policy provision and reported separately in monitoring, with minimal evidence that either considers the impact of the compounding experience of being both a refugee and a disabled person (Walton et al., 2020). While there is a legacy of robust scholarship on the inclusion of refugee students, and the inclusion of disabled students, research has only recently considered students who are both refugees and disabled. This student population has been described as “forgotten or invisible” (Crock et al, 2017, p.3) and “among the most socially and economically disadvantaged” (King et al, 2010, p.180). Research in the Global North and the Global South (King, et al., 2010; Tadesse, 2014) shows under-reporting of disability by immigrant or refugee families; under-enrolment and exclusion of disabled refugees (often depending on type of disability); resistance to disability assessment and referral; and overrepresentation of refugee students in special education settings. The reasons for this are complex and relate to insecure status, fear of further disadvantage, and different cultural conceptions of disability and educational support. Global South countries report lower rates of enrolment for disabled refugee students because of factors that include inadequate teacher training, lack of teaching aids and assistive devices, inflexible curricula and inaccessible buildings (Crock et al., 2017).  

Intersectionality is a theoretical framework that challenges homogenising and essentialising experiences and furthers an understanding of the unequal social relations that produce the exclusion of disabled refugee students. It recognises their multiple and intersecting identities that are time and context dependent and the complex ways in which their experiences are shaped by the interstices of power that give rise to multiple axes of oppression. Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw (Crenshaw, 1991), intersectionality describes the compounding disadvantage experienced by people living with multiple oppressed identities. Increased attention to intersectional identities in inclusive education research and practice is advocated by Bešić, Paleczek and Gasteiger-Klicpera (2020) in their study of disability, refugee status and gender in Austria. Following these authors and others, this paper addresses the research question: 

How can the right to a quality, inclusive education for disabled refugees be realised through understanding their intersectional identities? 

While intersectionality is a generative contribution to understanding issues of educational exclusion, it is easily diminished as it travels (Salem, 2018) from Crenshaw’s original conceptualisation. The term is sometimes recruited to convey an additive approach that acknowledges multiple identities without interrogating the complexities at the confluence of these identities (Rice, Harrison and Friedman, 2019).   

The purpose of this paper is to advance an intersectional analysis of the tensions experienced by disabled refugees in accessing and succeeding in education in different contexts. We achieve this objective by referring to literature from European contexts of refugee education and to empirical data generated by the authors from three African contexts. We show that an intersectional analysis must include the following prerequisite concepts: power and oppression; historicity, geography, culture and context; a theory of knowledge and knowers; relationality, agency and embodiment; and must advance justice. 

An initial literature review was conducted by searching databases for combinations of the terms disability/disabled/special (educational) needs/SEN/SEND with the words refugee/(im)migrant/displaced people and with education/schooling. This yields literature predominantly from the Global North, including the USA and Europe, despite the fact that world’s largest refugee populations are in the Global South. There is valuable learning from Global South contexts that can inform policy and practice in Europe and elsewhere (Lewis, 2017), and conversations about refugee and disability education are enhanced with Global South perspectives. The empirical research generated data in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Uganda. These countries represent a range of approaches to refugee settlement, including encampment with restricted movement, and dispersal into the host country community, and a combination of these. All three are signatories to the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. We took a qualitative approach that acknowledges participants’ expertise in their own lives and experiences, and methods that enable participants’ voice. Individual interviews were conducted with refugee students and their families, education officials (principals, district administrators etc), and workers in non-government community organisations in each of these contexts. Complex ethical issues were considered, and ethical approval was granted by all partner universities. The International Classification of Functioning was used as a determinant of disability, and we considered those within and outside formal education structures. Increased attention to decolonised intersectional approaches that promote the localisation of knowledge production in refugee studies is advocated by Landau (2012) and Shivakoti and Milner (2021) in their research on north-south research collaboration. Following these authors and others, we ensured that interviews were conducted by researchers in these contexts, with translators and interpreters, and then transcribed. We analysed the data thematically, within a social ecosystem model (Hodgson & Spours, 2016) which locates activities and practices in a conceptual space that is impacted by vertical facilitatory mechanisms such as international, national and local policies and regulations, resource allocation etc. and the horizontal connectivities, interactions and relationships between local actors. The prerequisite concepts of intersectionality were then used as an analytic framework with which we further analysed the data to answer the research question. The rigour and quality of the findings are secured by the convergence of multiple analyses across the research contexts and through constant dialogue between partners located in both the Global North and Global South.

Realisation of disabled refugees’ right to an inclusive, quality education in all global contexts requires the following considerations: * If power and oppression are ignored, the inclusion of disabled refugees easily becomes a ‘mix and stir’ approach that assumes that all students are equally different. The unequal social relations that produce their exclusion must be recognised. * In a historical void, ‘non-achievement’ on tests is attributed to deficits associated with one or more of an individual’s constituent identities, rather than systemic failure. * Recognition of location and space is crucial to ensure that experience is not assumed to be universal. Regimes of inequality work differently in different locations, and are exercised beyond education, in health, legal frameworks, and economic possibilities and constraints. * A theory of knowledge and knowers ensures that disabled refugee students are recognised as experts in their lives, and accorded the ‘testimonial justice’ that Fricker (2007) describes, that is, credibility untainted by prejudice and stereotype. * Relational intersectionality disrupts tendencies to work in silos and the competition for recognition along either disability or refugee status as identity markers. * Embodiment frustrates attempts to create hierarchies of inequality because students are not sequentially refugees and disabled, but are simultaneously so. Common cause is found in resisting the mechanisms that produce exclusion. * Without recognising agency, narratives of disabled refugee students can sound like outdated charitable discourses. Stories of resilience and resistance need to be told, rather than chronicles of deficit and misery. The self and community advocacy of marginalised groups needs to be celebrated and amplified. We conclude with an argument for justice to be foregrounded in an intersectional analysis. Intersectionality needs to be translated into activism and action with emancipatory impact on the life worlds of disabled refugee students in host countries across the world.

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