Translanguaging, displacement and psycho-social support in NGO settings: exploring informal education for refugees, IDPs and host communities in Iraq

This paper draws on qualitative research carried out over two years with the international NGO Mercy Corps across their programmes in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. In its work providing ‘adolescent friendly spaces’ for... [ view full abstract ]

This paper draws on qualitative research carried out over two years with the international NGO Mercy Corps across their programmes in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. In its work providing ‘adolescent friendly spaces’ for mixed groups of Kurdish, Iraqi and Syrian young men and women, the NGO runs informal education programmes including language classes and technical courses. At the core of these interventions are two goals: the psycho-social support of these young men and women and an approach to community cohesion which aims to help these diverse communities understand each other better and live alongside each other for indefinite periods of time. Language is therefore central to both goals, whether as a language of instruction or as a means of providing opportunities for the young men and women to share their experiences of displacement. How do the teachers (known as ‘coaches’) draw on this linguistic diversity and how does language fit into their work, particularly the psycho-social support and community cohesion?

The data drawn on to explore these questions includes lesson observations and interviews with teachers and learners as well as field notes from my time in several of the centres. Methods of analysis include the lens of translanguaging as I am interested in how it can foreground speakers’ use of complex interrelated discursive practices that cannot be easily assigned to one or another traditional definition of language but which make up their complete language repertoire (Garcia and Wei 2014: 22) when these repertoires include different varieties of Kurdish, Arabic and English. I am also interested in the extent to which the act of translangugaing emphasizes the transformative power of removing the hierarchy of these language practices and ‘creates a social space for the multilingual language user by bringing together different dimensions of their personal history, experience and environment’ (Wei 2011: 1223) at times of heightened mobility and conflict.

References

Garcia, O. and Li Wei. 2014. Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education. Palgrave Macmillan.

Wei, L. (2011) Moment analysis and translanguaging space: Discursive consruction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(5), 1222-1235.