Work in Progress: Exceptional and futureless humanitarian education in Lebanon

Maha Shuayb and Cathrine Brun write about their Work in Progress seminar this Thursday, entitled Exceptional and futureless humanitarian education in Lebanon: Prospects for shifting the lens. The seminar is from 16.30 to 18.00 on Thursday, 7 November in JHB307.

In this talk, we aim to unpack and analyse the potentials and shortcomings of a humanitarian framework for educational responses in protracted displacement. Most literature on this topic tends to examine humanitarianism and education separately and few studies have analysed the effect of the humanitarian model on the education provisions and policies and most importantly on the outcomes. Humanitarianism is concerned with the immediate while education is a future oriented-activity. Hence the interrelation between the two might appear an oxymoron. At the same time, calls to shift the humanitarian discourse from relief and survival to development have given strong grounds to include education as part of the humanitarian response in a situation of crisis. Yet there is a lack of clarity concerning the concept of development which the education provisions rest on. In the talk we will unpack the concept of education in emergency and its effect on students’ schooling outcomes. The study focuses on Lebanon as a case to analyse the potentials and limitations of this model. To do so, the study analyses the educational policies and interventions Lebanon introduced in the last seven years since the outbreak of the Syrian crisis and examine their impact on the education outcomes of Syrian children. In conclusion, we reflect on some of the potential outcomes of the current model and introduces some alternatives to the current education system for refugees. 

Maha Shuayb is the director of the Centre for Lebanese Studies (CLS). Maha has a PhD in education from the University of Cambridge. She also teaches part-time at the Lebanese American University. She is currently a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge. Maha’s research focuses on the sociology and politics of education particularly equity and equality in education and the implications of the politicization of education particularly on marginalized groups. Over the past eight years, Maha has been occupied with the education response to the Syrian Refugee crisis in Lebanon. She has headed a number of research studies looking at access and quality of education for refugees and the bottlenecks. A recent studies include a comparative longitudinal study between Lebanon, Turkey, Germany and Australia which examines the impact of status on education provisions for refugees in the four countries. 

Professor Cathrine Brun is a human geographer and Director of the Centre for Development and Emergency Practice (CENDEP), the School of Architecture at Oxford Brookes University, UK. Her research-interests concern forced migration and conflict, housing and home; theory, ethics and practice of humanitarianism. Working closely with local and national organisations in places like Georgia, Sri Lanka, Malawi and Lebanon, her approach to research is qualitative, ethnographic and using action research as a way of co-producing knowledge. Some recent publications include “Living with shifting borders: peripheralisation and the production of invisibility” (2017, Geopolitics); “Mobilising home for long term displacement: a reflection on the durable solutions” (with Anita H. Fábos, 2017, Journal of Human Rights Practice,); “Homemaking in limbo? A conceptual framework” (with Anita H. Fàbos, Refuge, 2015) and “There is no Future in Humanitarianism” (History and Anthropology, 2015).

Maha, the CLS and Cathrine and CENDEP currently collaborate on an ESRC and IDRC funded research programme on From Education to Employment: young people’s trajectories in the context of protracted displacement in Lebanon and Jordan.