Refugees’ Counter-Knowledge: Resisting Stereotypes, Becoming Political

In saying “We are really one world,” the artist showed that he rejects a world marked by divisions along national lines and imagines a peaceful unity of all human beings. He expressed his desire to facilitate dialogue among various nations through his cultural asset: the universal language of music. Using the flower metaphor, he portrayed this lived cosmopolitanism as an enriching experience for everyone involved. Against the perception of refugees as dangerous, his orchestra uses music to tell stories of peacefully coexisting rather than endangering one another. The musician utilizes his knowledge of his abilities to connect nations and foster human communication beyond national identities and religions.

The artist also reflected on the impact of his work, citing the example of an elderly Jewish man who attended a concert and afterwards, in tears, told the musicians, “Now I know why, what do the bridges between the communities and the bridges between the nations mean, now I really know.” At the same time, the artist also faced resistance: When he applied for the program “U-Bahn Stars” (“Stars of the Subway”) funded by the Viennese public transport company, which invites artists to perform at designated areas within subway stations, he was rejected because his music did “not represent European culture.” He found this very strange, remarking that “music is an international language that everyone can understand in their own way.” I myself had implicitly assumed that music was a tool primarily for coping with emotional hardship, but during the course of my research I realized that art had a distinctly political role in expressing alternative knowledge about the world.

Refugees’ Counter-Knowledge: Not Just Learners

Another powerful expression of counter-knowledge challenged the perception of refugees and asylum seekers as perpetual students, obligated to attend more and more integration courses rather than being allowed to work. Challenging this infantilization and the perpetual schooling goes to the core of questions of knowledge itself: It means questioning ideas about who is ignorant and who is knowledgeable and reversing the roles of student and teacher. Refugees and asylum seekers were aware of their extraordinary language and intercultural skills, as well as their expertise on the asylum system, and they positioned themselves as teachers when it became clear that language course teachers or consultants actually understood less about the respective matters. Take the role reversal that happened in a workshop in Vienna. While the workshop was conducted in Arabic, the instructor was not a native Arabic speaker and had been struggling to maintain his authority. During the session, participants began praising his language skills in a way akin to how they were accustomed to being lauded for their proficiency in German. At one point, the teacher requested a German-to-Arabic translator. A participant confidently rose from her seat to take up a position next to the instructor. Her assertiveness led everyone, including the teacher and myself, to mistakenly believe she was a professional translator provided by the hosting institute. In reality, she was a regular attendee who used her language abilities to help the instructor and clarify questions from her peers. This was not an isolated incident, either: I witnessed several instances in Berlin and Vienna where students were initially asked only to assist but effectively took over the class because of their language skills. In these cases, the students not only challenged their assigned roles in the classroom by presenting themselves as instructors instead of students but also utilized their language abilities to subvert the construct of refugees as (merely) learners.

Refugees and asylum seekers reversed the student-teacher roles outside of the classroom, as well, and challenged my own involvement in making them students through (however well-meant) compliments on their language skills. A couple of my research participants mirrored this back to me by telling me, repeatedly and in mock surprise, how good my German was. They made me experience how uncomfortable and infantilizing it is to be constantly reminded that you are not quite there yet and that others are allowed to judge your progress. My interlocutors also reversed the researcher-researched relation when they examined my knowledge instead of having me extract their ideas. Tired of being asked to explain what being a refugee means to them, one of them replied, “How will you define ‘refugee’?,” leaving me struggling to come up with a good answer.

Conclusion

Dominant knowledge about refugees and asylum seekers depoliticizes refugees and their agency, casting them as too dangerous or too childlike to have any political rights. When refugees challenge the dominant knowledge about them, they challenge being suspended in this apolitical space between Otherness and the expectation to integrate. They demand to be treated normally while being different: They point to contributions they can make to a host society precisely because they bring something new to it. They contribute new and different forms of knowledge about themselves individually and refugees and asylum seekers as a whole. This then also challenges our knowledge about how we organize society and politics, where boundaries are drawn, and to what end.