Governing Sponsorship in a Literacy Support Program for Resettled Refugee Students

Abstract

This essay proposes that a “governmentality” framework applied to literacy sponsorship in refugee communities can help identify and critique competing agendas of control. By drawing on interview transcripts collected from an after-school program for refugee youth, the essay offers a glimpse of the different perspectives that shape tutor and aid worker discourse. Some of these discourses deceptively appear to be more “acceptable” than others, while sponsors can seem to be limited in their range of rhetorical strategies for talking about their work with refugee students. Michel Foucault’s (1991a) theory of governmentality shows how such discourses do not necessarily emanate from sponsors themselves, as if they are a central location of authority, but from power relations that are diffuse and contradictory. By examining these relations, a governmentality framework can help teacher-scholars in the community identify alternative discourses to those that shape the sponsor-sponsored paradigm.

Journal
Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric
Published
2018-04-01
DOI
10.59236/rjv18i1pp39-70
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