The British Sociological Association

Lessons from Accompaniment as a Research Methodology: Researching For & With Undocumented Immigrant Students in New York City
Laura Assanmal Peláez (Adjunct Instructor and Doctoral Student New York University)

In her reflection on Research as Accompaniment, Dr. Leisy Abrego (2020) writes: “We cannot fully distance ourselves from the structures that produce violence; intellectualizing is not the end goal. Instead, we are deeply committed to people’s wellbeing just as much as, and often more than, to the advancement of a field. We are aiming to be in accompaniment.” Ethnographers working at the intersection of educational research and immigration, like Abrego (2020) and Mangual Figueroa (2014), have defined accompaniment as a research principle and ethos; as a disposition, a sensibility, and a pattern of behavior. It is a commitment based on a cultivated capacity for making connections with others, identifying with them, and helping them navigate structures of oppression. It is this practice of accompaniment, they argue, that gives them access to people’s lives in ways that can evoke deep emotions from study participants, readers, and audience members.

What does following an ethic of accompaniment look like in qualitative research of educational settings? How can we go beyond the liability-centric prescriptions of Internal Review Boards to carry out ethical, reciprocal sociological research in education that gets us closer to education as a practice of freedom? What are some of the lessons, hopes, provocations, and limitations of adopting a stance of accompaniment when working with and for minoritized—specifically immigrant and undocumented—youth across educational settings? This session seeks to begin touching upon those questions, and will take the form of an interactive workshop. PhD candidate at NYU Steinhardt Sociology of Education, Laura Assanmal Peláez, will share her experiences carrying out qualitative fieldwork with undocumented, unhoused, Venezuelan asylum-seeking youth in New York City, all while trying to exercise an ethic of accompaniment as a research method. In this session, participants will be introduced to and encouraged to engage in discussion on the theory of principles of accompaniment, and begin a methodological conversation on research on ethics & rigor, sociological research for immigrant well-being, and ideas of beneficence and departure.

Pedagogical love: The relational condition for a socially just refugee education
Dr Jumana Al-Waeli (British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Ulster University)

The paper discusses a conceptual framework for socially just education, developed as part of my doctoral study conducted with a group of Syrian refugee learners in the United Kingdom. It proposes adding a fourth pillar of relational justice as pedagogical love to Nancy Fraser’s conceptualisation of social justice as parity of participation in the context of refugee schooling.

In recent years, the UK's neo-liberal and capitalist notions of competitive self-centredness and pervasive individualism have been effectively operating to disregard the interdependent nature of human beings and render love and care in educational settings unprofessional and undesirable. Many schools that host refugee children have also been increasingly adopting the government's "Hostile Environment" policies, the culture of performativity and the standardised approach to education. By doing so, schools have effectively worked to exclude young refugees from participating on par with their counterparts. Accordingly, the paper stipulates the need for developing and applying transformative educational pedagogies that deploy sustainable practices of critical love to cater for refugee students' unique needs and combat different social, cultural, economic, and political injustices.

The framework builds on the work of McIntyre and Abrams (2020) in the context of refugee schooling, which substantiates the provision of conditions for social justice as parity of participation (Fraser, 2008) for regaining a sense of home and ordinariness (Kohli, 2011).This paper contends that the relational realm of social justice as pedagogical love can be a site for mitigating (or generating) injustices independently and in relation to the cultural, economic and political conditions for social justice. It is, therefore, a politically significant, vital site for understanding and tackling misrecognition, the lack of equitable distribution of resources and the absence of fair and equal representation within school systems and processes, which contribute to hindering the young refugees' learning, sense of belonging, and the ability to flourish and regain a sense of home in their new environments.