'I Integrate, Therefore I Am': Contesting the Normalizing Discourse of Integrationism through Conversations with Refugee Women

Abstract

The discourse of integration has been ascendant in migration policy internationally, particularly after western concerns linking terrorism with cultural separatism. Retreats from multiculturalism signal a view that conformance by outsiders with a normative, universal, and static national citizen subject will facilitate social cohesion. The discourse of integrationism, perpetuated through the practice of UnSpeak (Poole 2006), represents resettled refugees as innately problematic against dominant, normative values (Marston 2004). I explore these representations in Australian settlement education policy and suggest an appeal to marginal voices (Foucault 1980; Spivak 1988) as a means for contesting them. Rejecting an engagement driven by policy categories (Bakewell 2008), I interview nine, long settled Melbourne refugee women about education’s purposes. I make sense of the women’s feedback through Foucault’s (1990) Care of the Self, which provides an account of agency in the subject. The interviewees emphasize education’s role in facilitating self actualization, informed by a ‘knowledge of the self’. In contrast to their dominant representation as the problematic subjects of a policy encouraging conformity, refugees should be regarded as agents with potential.

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