3School Time

Teleological Violence and the Pain of Progress

Education: A Powerful Weapon

A banner over the school director’s office read: “The future is in school today” (see fig. 3.1). A painted metal sign standing in the school compound stated: “Education is the only powerful weapon to change the world!” (see fig. 3.2).

Taken together, these two statements link the school with the present and future, tying both to a progressive vision of changing the world. The belief that education aligns the present with the future and brings about a positive change is, perhaps, as old as formal schooling itself. So strong is this faith that, at present, development organizations, educational policy makers, and school systems around the world continue to promote education as a tool to get ahead, despite increasing evidence that for many, it may not fulfill its promises (Jeffrey 2010; Jeffrey et al. 2004, 2005; Mains 2011; Honwana and De Boeck 2012; Stambach and Hall 2016).

The school enrollment rates tell the story of those failed promises for refugees. A hand-drawn attendance chart on the wall of the school director’s office showed a clear progression in the enrollment numbers for local and refugee children since 2010. While the overall enrollment had been increasing, there was a steady decline in refugee enrollment. In the 2014–2015 academic year, the number of refugee students dropped from 300 the year before to a mere 167. Since then, it had continued to decline. Yet the camp was full; new arrivals were packed in warehouse-like structures at the edge of camp, where they waited for up to a month to be allocated housing. The Mai Aini secondary school is not alone in its low enrollments. The newly built secondary school in the Hitsats camp, along with the elementary schools in both camps, was also thinly enrolled.

Why, we wondered, if schooling had such positive connotations, were there not more refugees in school? If education is such a powerful weapon to change the world and if the future is, in fact, in school today, why were refugees not in school?

The temporality of education presupposes a forward march toward progress. Education produces a linear, unidirectional track between present actions and future accomplishments in which one step builds on the previous and leads toward the next. This linear ordering inherently disciplines its subjects, situating them in a position where they are led to believe that their actions in the present will shape their future (Foucault 1978). However, refugees are often situated on the sidelines of that linear pathway, and those who attempt to get ahead face cruel forms of social, economic, and spatial immobility.

Fig. 3.1. Sign in secondary school in refugee camp. Photo by Amanda Poole.

Fig. 3.2. Sign in secondary school compound in refugee camp. Photo by Amanda Poole.

Teleological time becomes violent when people believe that hard work, discipline, having a plan, and attaching that plan to broader developmental goals will lead to personal and collective progress and prosperity but also know, without a doubt, that they will face very specific impediments that will block their progress and aspirations. In other words, teleological violence exists when the logics of progress confront the realities of structural barriers.¹ Additionally, teleological violence masks the work done by these barriers.

A key component of teleological violence is what Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron refer to as symbolic violence (1990). Symbolic violence is the violence done to nondominant groups struggling to succeed in education systems designed for dominant groups.² Symbolic violence results in the stigmatization of nondominant groups by masking the structural barriers to success (the real reasons for the nondominant group’s inability to succeed) and instead blaming these groups for their “failure.”

Teleological violence might be thought of as an acute form of symbolic violence resulting from the temporal contradictions produced when disadvantaged populations engage in activities that they believe will enable them to achieve a particular end—in this case, progress through schooling—and that end is then understood to be impossible. Experiences of formal schooling, in general, and success at schooling, in particular, produce an orientation toward the future and present in students that is rooted in individual ambition and a sense of duty to help society develop. But the refugee condition entails structural constraints that prevent refugees from actualizing those ambitions. Teleological violence ensues when refugees feel beholden to temporalities that promise the rewards of a bright future but also know, with certainty, that that future is out of reach.³

Although the crisis of teleology has the potential to harm refugees in very specific ways, they are not the only ones who experience teleologies violently. Indeed, the precarity of youth is a manifestation of the rupture of teleological time (Mains 2011). Marginalized youth in many circumstances have a problematic relationship with time and the future. For example, Craig Jeffrey, Patricia Jeffery, and Roger Jeffery note a rise in alcoholism and criminal activity among educated, unemployed lower-caste men in India (2005). Drug use and a turn to irregular/illegal economic activities are apparent in other studies of marginalized youth as well (Mains 2011; DiNunzio 2019). Marginalized youth may be made available for various forms of labor that are violent or place them at risk of experiencing violence (Hoffman 2011). Indeed, the failure of youth, both educated and uneducated, to “grow up,” find work, and forge a future for themselves is so prevalent that a number of studies have questioned whether youth are “vanguard or vandals” and “makers or breakers” (Abbink 2005; Honwana and De Boeck 2005). With the exception of Daniel Mains’s research, these studies do not use teleological time as an analytical frame specifically, but they do point to similar phenomena and conditions that can be thought of as akin to teleological violence.

The refugees we talked to were able to sharply articulate these paradoxes and the violence inherent in them. One refugee who had graduated from college in Ethiopia reflected on the pain of unmet aspirations created by education: “If you teach someone that going out in the sun is harmful, and then you send them out without shelter . . . [it is] better to never know the sun is bad.” The awareness that the sun is bad, like the awareness that education is good, is posited as knowledge that makes us better, but it only does so if we can change our behavior. If we are structurally prevented from changing our behavior by being systematically denied shelter (in the case of sun exposure) and jobs or opportunities (in the case of education), the knowledge gained becomes worse than worthless. When refugees do everything they are supposed to do to succeed and adapt to the strict teleological discipline of education only to find themselves stuck once more, unable to work legally, advance professionally, and assume the responsibilities of adulthood, it burns them. As another refugee described teleological violence, “Four years ago, I graduated. I have an asset. But if you have a big asset and you cannot use it, it is like a virus. It will drive you crazy.”

What kind of powerful weapon is schooling? Our answer is that it is a teleological one that turns on those it purportedly enlightens and uses those supposedly enlightening processes to do so. Education, we found, was often described by those we interviewed as a sort of double-edged sword—having all the potential to change the world in positive ways but often causing harm to refugees themselves.

In the following section, we explore the various intersecting components that make up teleological violence, particularly as it manifests among educated refugees. We unpack the way education and schooling function as the machinery that produces modernist, progress-oriented notions of teleological time—or, in other words, how schools function as factories of teleological time. We then look at the ways that the teleological expectations placed on and enacted by educated people are bisected by the temporalities of humanitarian bureaucracy to produce a paradoxical subject: the educated refugee. The educated refugee experiences the contradictions of teleological violence in a particularly acute form where their future is concerned—a future, we should note, that is aborted due to structural barriers to progress, such as prohibitions on legal work and further education. We then illustrate the moral freighting of teleological time and how that places it in a relationship between migration and camp time. And finally, we explore how refugees attempt to produce alternatives to the contradictions of teleological violence.

Schools as Factories of Teleological Time

In order to get satisfaction from work, you have to finish it on time. This is because the reason you work is to do something useful that will be ready when it is needed. (Mehari et al. 2002a, 112)

When you work hard there is another benefit, there is an increased production of goods and services. (Mehari et al. 2002b, 100)

In formal schooling, particularly in the developing world, the teleology of education inherently binds individual behavior to temporalities of progress and to the notion of national development (Fuller 1991; Katz 2004). Taken from units on industriousness in the Ethiopian Civic and Ethical Education (CEE) curriculum for grades ten and eleven, the quotations above are examples of this. These quotations are taken from units that explicitly link individual work habits and work ethics to economic production and national development. They are preceded by units that focus on individual habits and behaviors, which cover topics such as savings. The following unit on macroeconomics puts individual hard work and industriousness into a broader frame so that students visualize how their self-discipline aligns with the trajectory of the nation. For example, the curriculum explains the benefits of having a parsed-out daily schedule by linking it with the value of accomplishing larger goals. A lesson titled “Knowledge and the Habit of Reading” presents a case study of a student schedule and asks students to discuss the importance of having a daily schedule, even when not in school. It then provides an example of an influential journalist, noting that reading “offers an opportunity to get more knowledge and make a difference” and that “people with knowledge command respect in society. You can be one of them” (Mehari et. al. 2002a, 162).

The Ethiopian civics curriculum is an example of a phenomenon common elsewhere; it illustrates how the teleological time of education manifests in the developmentalist state where ideals, practices, and institutions of schooling have been imported to explicitly link students and their communities to a modernist trajectory (Katz 2004). Time and space are thus co-constituted and bound to the notion of progress. In this context, schooling doubly binds people to place and community on one hand and to dominant structures and notions of modernity and progress on the other (Hall 1997; Stambach 2000). Schools are prime institutions through which the linear and teleological temporality of modernity, however contradictory it may be, is socially reproduced and internalized. Modern schools are among the many industrial-era institutions designed to parse time by the hour, day, week, and year, aligning smaller units of time with increasingly larger ones and producing a subject that understands the benefits and consequences of adhering to or deviating from this temporal discipline (Foucault 1978). The rise of modern schooling in Europe, for example, came to be organized according to a linear, chronological temporality, such that homogeneous groups of children could progress in learning together through small temporal units, each tethered to stages of development (Biesta 2013). However, the temporal discipline promoted through schooling in particular, and education more broadly, is distinct because it attaches smaller units of incrementally organized time to distant goals and broader notions of progress. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault highlights schools as particularly adept at producing and normalizing subjects’ attachments to incremental time, aligning time with categorized knowledge, and giving that knowledge power through the surveillance techniques of the examination (1978). Schooling accomplishes this through spatial and temporal ordering.

This model of scheduled time that orders smaller increments (periods) with ever larger ones (days, weeks, terms, years), assigning each a task (knowledge to be mastered) that is evaluated and for which rewards will be granted, is still, arguably, the way schools are structured. Thus, schools teach students to keep time, use time, and master time; progress is assessed based on how well one adheres to and performs within these temporal structures (McClaren 1986).

Schools in the refugee camps were no exception. Students were expected to be punctual and to devote a great deal of time to their studies, despite the fact that their time often had to be spent on other things, such as waiting for humanitarian bureaucracy or conducting necessary everyday chores. Schooling operated according to daily, weekly, semester-long, and yearlong schedules that were interlocked and nested within each other, enabling the systematic movement toward a goal or outcome, often embodied by end-term examinations and report cards. The entire multiyear experience of schooling then builds toward the culminating national examination.

The teleological nature of education also ascribes a morality that entails a sense of individual responsibility for progress. Mains notes that education produces expectations in the educated individual: “The educated individual expects to be transformed so that his future will be better than the present” (Mains 2007, 665). An actor who is temporally disciplined and uses their time well is supposed to be successful, and conversely, one who lacks temporal discipline has failed to use their time well (Mains 2007, 2011).

If we understand that teleological time, as it shows up in processes of schooling, is organized incrementally, then it is easy to understand how schools are like factories designed to assert the normalcy and benevolence of these teleological trajectories, even when they systematically leave behind and weed out certain people. The sociology and anthropology of education literatures have carefully and ethnographically diagrammed the ways that schools reproduce inequalities while producing ideologies of meritocracy and achievement (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990; Bowles and Gintis 1976; Willis 1977), in no small part through the inculcation of teleological temporalities, the disciplining of students to adhere to these temporalities, and the attachment of morality to their success or failure at doing so (Foucault 1978). Anna Bennett and Penny Jane Burke (2018) illuminate how the meritocratic logic of education presents a linear and rigid understanding of developmental time frames that tends to assume that problems encountered by students are due to individual deficit and can best be fixed by developing the right personal habits (i.e., setting goals, creating action plans, using calendars, and chunking tasks). All of these strategies prioritize institutional, homogeneous time frames and problematize students unable to conform to them. Furthermore, they find that students themselves internalize this sense of personal deficit, failing to recognize structural and temporal barriers to their success.

Returning to the CEE curriculum that we began this section with, we might read that curriculum as a teleological chronotope (Bakhtin 1981; Keunen 2011). Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope illuminates genres or narratives in which time and space shape and animate each other (1981). In a teleological chronotope, the narrative involves a sequence of events oriented toward progress; a protagonist follows certain steps to arrive at (or fail to arrive at) a previously understood goal or outcome (Keunen 2011). The teleological chronotope bundles together incrementally ordered time, the morality of student discipline and “hard work,” and notions of progress both for the individual student and for national development. A teleological chronotope, we argue, functions to flatten space into a preset path of predictable steps, while time is funneled into a unilinear progression toward a known end with consequences for deviating from the precise steps on the path.

We might think of CEE as the blueprint for what an Ethiopian citizen should be. The teleological chronotope apparent in Ethiopia’s CEE posits students as the protagonist who, if temporally disciplined and engaged in a prescribed set of behaviors, will bring about a better future for themselves and the nation. The curriculum thus binds daily time, the future, and Ethiopian national development together in a narrative of progress encapsulated in the epitaph from the previous section: The future is in school today.

These curricula contain messages that frame and illustrate the teleological orientation of schooling by focusing on responsibility, industriousness, self-reliance, saving, community participation, and the pursuit of wisdom. Throughout the curriculum, students are given the message that their duty is to study hard to have a better future for themselves and to bring progress to the nation. The idea conveyed is that hard work, timeliness, and discipline will enable individuals and the country to march toward a more prosperous future. Indeed, that future is held up to be inevitable if only each actor plays their part to the best of their ability.

But where do refugees, who are not Ethiopian citizens but temporary guests, fit into this national, teleological chronotope? The modern temporalities produced by schooling exist in an uncomfortable relationship with alternate ways of imagining the future, particularly in the context of hospitality, which renders connection to place more tenuous and temporary for guests. Hospitality, as we noted in chapter 2, is welcoming but exclusionary; it denies refugees full membership in a polity. Thus, hospitality produces structural barriers to progress, even as performances of being a good host disguise those barriers. Meanwhile, teleological chronotopes position educated refugees on a developmental trajectory. For Ethiopian students, the teleological orientation of schooling links notions of national space with future development. It also tethers refugees to these same notions of development and progress; however, refugees have no legal attachment to the nation. For refugees, as we explore later in this chapter, imaginaries of development and modernity are appealing, but they are imagined as somewhere “out there” in the world, not in the refugee camp, and often not in Ethiopia. Refugee students may be attached to teleological notions of time, but they are also keenly aware of how out of reach progress is and how their status as refugees makes it so. The next section details the processes through which refugees are impeded from full participation in teleological time.

Telos in the Time of the Camp: Hospitality, Humanitarian Bureaucracy, and the Cultural Production of the Educated Refugee

As we toured the Mai Aini secondary school, the director kept repeating, “You wouldn’t expect a school like this to be for refugees.” The school was well equipped, clean, and relatively new, having been constructed to serve refugees and local students shortly after the camp opened in 2008. The teachers were motivated, and the library was relatively well stocked. It was indeed a beautiful school, but why was the director surprised? Through his praise of the school and his expression of surprise that a school “like this” was built for refugees, the director positioned himself as a generous but skeptical benefactor who was subtly questioning whether or not refugees merited such a gift. The overt message was that refugees were lucky to go to such a school. The implied message was that as refugees, they somehow deserved less.

A closer look at the school director’s statement—“You would not expect a school like this to be for refugees”—reveals the productive work of teleological violence; the teleological orientation of schooling and the constant assertion that schooling is a gift for refugees, rather than a necessity or human right, work together to culturally produce a particular kind of educated subject: an educated refugee.⁴ Refugee schooling is simultaneously posited in different ways: a human right; a reward for the disciplined, hardworking, and meritorious; and a gift for the underprivileged. The school director’s statement encapsulates all of these meanings, asserting the bold generosity of the host while reifying the otherness of the refugee-guest. While the conceptualization of education as a reward for the meritorious suggests that anyone who works hard enough will accomplish good things, the conceptualization of education as a gift for the needy fundamentally posits refugees as somehow less deserving than others. The contradiction between these two framings of education results in a painful and dangerous condition. The subject position of the educated refugee is marked by this frustrating paradox: the teleologies of education claim to propel refugees forward—to enable to them to progress if only they do the right things—while the structures of being a refugee hold them back, relegating them to the status of temporary guest.

Another illustration of this contradiction between education as a reward for hard work and education as a gift can be found in conflicts in a school that served residents of the town of Mai Tsebri and refugees from the Adi Harush camp. We had heard there were tensions in the Mai Tsebri school, the only school in our study that was located in a village. The school’s teachers and administration were scrambling to accommodate both a fluid population of refugees and a rapidly growing population of Ethiopian students arriving each year in the booming town. The challenges were in many ways obvious, involving a severe shortage of resources and impressive ingenuity on behalf of the teachers and administration who repurposed materials for ad hoc classrooms, raised funds for a new building, and found work-arounds for book shortages. Yet the school director also described social tensions between refugees and locals that centered on the perceived desire for refugees to be treated differently. The thornier concerns revolved around the production of social difference.

A central tenet of the literature on cultural production holds that processes of schooling not only reproduce existing social differences and inequalities; they also produce tastes, habits, and identities that may resist, contest, or alter social categories or status groups (Levinson et al. 1996). In many circumstances, student difference is reinforced, reified, and reproduced without their doing a single thing or simply because they have tried to advocate for themselves in positive and proactive ways. Here we explore the subject position of educated refugee, which is produced through the logics of progress, on one hand, and hospitality and bureaucratic humanitarian care, on the other.

The cultural production of the educated refugee is not only inculcated with and implicated in very particular notions of progress and telos but also embodies the contradiction inherent in being an educated refugee that is the focus of this chapter. As noted earlier, the paradox of educated refugees is that they, by virtue of being educated persons, are heavily socialized to understand their potential, possibility, and responsibility, but as refugees, they are also made keenly aware of very clear structural limitations to progress. Here we focus on how humanitarian care of refugee students demarcated them as refugees and produced the conditions for their differentiation. Refugees’ own understandings of and advocacy for themselves as protected subjects also contribute to their framing as refugees.

Tensions that arose every year in the Mai Tsebri school around school uniforms are an apt illustration of how refugees are culturally produced through slow humanitarian bureaucracies. In Ethiopia, as in other parts of the developing world, wearing a uniform is important. It serves as a marker that one is a student—a distinct and often privileged identity. It further communicates that discipline is fundamental to being a student. The consistency with which a student wears their uniform and the condition in which the uniform is kept are often thought to reflect on the quality and character of the student. However, refugees, as well as many lower-income students, often cannot afford a uniform. Jennifer’s research in Eritrea and Ethiopia found that teachers in both places, despite saying that they understood the financial constraints that some students faced, still judged students who failed to wear a uniform and blamed problems with school discipline on this (2016, 2019, 2022). Even when students had a legitimate reason to not wear a uniform, they could be disciplined, punished, scrutinized, and judged for not being appropriately attired.

In the case of refugees, the Administration for Refugee and Returnee Affairs (ARRA) was supposed to provide their uniforms. However, ARRA was always late with the funds. In the Mai Tsebri secondary school, this created problems: refugee students felt discriminated against when the government failed to provide uniforms for them; Ethiopian students, many of whom came from poor, rural communities, felt that refugees were being given an unfair exception to the dress code; and teachers were unhappy to have a sizable number of students out of uniform. The annual late arrival of refugee uniforms served as an important means to demarcate who the refugees were, but it also inadvertently set them up for moral judgment. On the one hand, they were not regarded as “real” students because they were out of uniform. On the other hand, they were perceived as entitled, because exceptions were made for them that were not made for students from the host community, including those who struggled to afford uniforms. The late arrival of uniforms also illuminated the ways refugee students were victims of slow humanitarian bureaucracies; they were dependent on an institution (ARRA) that failed to provide for them in a timely manner. This reinforced lines of social difference in their school experience.

There were many other examples of the failure of humanitarian bureaucracy to provide for refugees in a timely manner in ways that disadvantaged them and challenged their dignity. On our first visit to the camps, we asked about refugees’ university experiences, and one student told us about a friend who was preparing to give a presentation that was required for graduation. He was expected to wear a suit for this talk. His understanding was that ARRA was supposed to provide him with additional funding for things like this, but despite some assurances that this would happen, ARRA never gave him the money. He ultimately had to borrow a suit from someone else. We heard reference to this story several times and found it significant that this story about a suit meant so much to refugee students. The fact that he told this story—and that this story circulated more broadly—shows the importance of feeling cared for and the painful stigma of feeling singled out. They wanted to be able to present themselves and showcase their accomplishments just as any other student, but doing so required getting assistance, and assistance moved at the glacial pace of bureaucracy, often arriving too late to be useful.

The late provision of necessities was a common complaint in refugee interactions with ARRA across educational settings. University students also complained that their monthly stipend was often late, a huge problem given that these funds were necessary to photocopy readings so that they could keep up with classes. This stipend also enabled refugees to purchase food and even showers in cases where the campus plumbing was nonfunctioning. This delay impacted refugees in other ways as well. Refugee applicants to university were only allowed to take the national exam after Ethiopian students, and their results were released late, meaning that they enrolled in university later and had limited selection of what to study. Most concerning to them, they had to start the school year up to three months late, meaning they had to ask for extra help from the instructor or other students. It was often difficult for them to catch up.

The slow, disconnected, bureaucratic temporality of hospitality conflicts with the way teleological, educational time requires that its subjects take responsibility for their success or failure. This leaves refugees facing such challenges as having to make up for two months of university education or figure out how to eat on no stipend. To face these challenges, they have to ask for help either from professors or fellow students. They also have to ask that special accommodations be made for them. This characterizes them as both needy and demanding, belying the prescribed “good guest” behavior that we discussed in the last chapter. All of this results in indignities that are uncomfortable and make it difficult for refugees to succeed.

These indignities extend to other perceived forms of discrimination that reproduce social difference for refugees in tertiary education. Many of the college students we spoke to had a distinct sense that they were only allowed to study at the convenience of the administration. Because they took the matriculation exam late, they were assigned to universities where there were slots left over in universities and programs that were less desirable. As the school director we quoted earlier implied, there was a sense that refugees somehow deserved—or at least should expect—whatever they were given and should be thankful for whatever that was. In a focus group discussion with refugees who were waiting for their matriculation results we heard that they would like to study subjects such as computer science and engineering but they were not assigned to those programs. They also said they would prefer not to study in Tigray and had requested universities in other parts of the country but were typically placed in Tigray because of “the need of the officials,” rather than their own desires and academic interests. The lateness of the refugee matriculation exam was a key reason why refugees were relegated to the “leftover” university assignments, but this was not just a temporal problem. Refugees had a strong sense that this occurred because of a belief that refugees did not merit the same treatment as Ethiopian students.

Refugees felt they were second-class citizens, devalued and differentiated from Ethiopian students and unable to compete on an even playing field. For example, several refugees noted that no matter how hard they worked, they would not be given the same rewards or opportunities as Ethiopian students. One young graduate shared a common complaint that we heard often from university students: “Your achievement is your achievement regardless of your school. There are awards given to top students in each college. These awards are not given to Eritreans, even if they are the top student scoring the highest marks. If an Eritrean scores top marks, it will be given to the next student.” While students frequently described this practice as demoralizing, others noted that the various forms of recognition denied to refugee students also harmed them in material ways. We often heard that professional leadership opportunities, such as serving as a prefect or teaching assistant, were preferentially allocated to Ethiopians regardless of refugee student accomplishments. These kinds of prizes and opportunities are essential for all students in a tight job market but are particularly essential for refugees, who compete in this tight market without the benefit of the legal right to work, further narrowing the opportunities available to them.

Many of the complaints about being stigmatized, not looked after, and not cared for stem from the nature of bureaucracy, which moves slowly, adheres to its own temporality, and therefore cannot be responsive to the individual needs of refugees. Bureaucratic temporalities serve and respond to the needs of the program, not the people it is supposed to serve. They not only move very slowly but are often unpredictable and impossible for refugees to control. Meanwhile, the requirement that refugees engage with and master the teleological time of schooling is extremely challenging given these sluggish bureaucratic temporalities. Bureaucratic time thwarts self-discipline, and it thwarts structured and planful time. It is anti-teleological because it works against refugees striving toward progress and accomplishing their desired ends.

The harm caused by bureaucratic time is compounded by the fact that refugees are under a system of bureaucratized hospitality that reinforces both the status of the host and the dependent, temporary status of the refugee. As we described in chapter 2, hospitality in refugee management concentrates power through a profoundly unequal “gift” exchange and distances the host from the quality or appropriateness of the gift. The gifts provided by humanitarian bureaucracies—UNHCR resettlement processes, WFP food distributions, and the array of services ARRA provides—seldom meet refugees’ needs fully and often work against their goals, plans, and teleological aspirations. Teleological violence is apparent in the disjuncture between the teleological time of school and the slow bureaucratic time of hospitality, but some of the extremes of teleological violence are experienced when refugees encounter a bleak and empty future.

Teleological Violence and the Aborted Future

“An asset you can’t use is an expense,” a university graduate and resident of Adi Harush camp told us. We were conducting a focus group with university graduates who were back in the camps in a bar owned by Berihu, our friend and interlocutor. A group of about ten university graduates sat under the shade of an awning drinking cold Cokes off low tables. The awning, the comfortable plastic chairs, the tables with their shiny plastic tablecloths, and the refrigerator were all purchased with the loan Berihu had taken out to buy his bar. Everyone nodded in agreement with the first speaker and chimed in. Another former student added, “When we stay here for a long time, our minds are damaged.” Members of the focus group then made frequent, almost poetic statements about the damage, not simply of living in the camp, which was hard enough, but of being relegated back to the camp. The value of their education, the fruit of their hard work, had been destroyed, and they were being forced into low-paying incentive jobs with no future after having been to university.

The lack of opportunity after graduation was experienced as a particularly acute form of temporal suffering; it was fueled by a sense of failed promises, of having been cheated out of something they were taught to believe they merited by virtue of their hard work. Theirs was an unsuccessful success (Varenne and McDermott 1998). In higher education, students are not only taught the curriculum but trained for a profession. Yet the end point for refugees is being stuck in the camp, unable to work legally except as incentive workers. A refugee commented that they expected a different outcome in their life: “We are at the same level as the ignorant people. What will be our output at last? Even though they gave us this chance for education, what is our output?” This suggests that education without “output,” or purpose, is meaningless. Another refugee expanded on this thought, noting that he had hoped that education would at least make him self-sufficient yet had failed to produce even this: “We are visionless. What are we going to do? We don’t know. We are visionless. We learn here and go to camp. What will I be later? Nothing. I will be the same as those who are not educated. If you always give food, it is not good. You need to teach a man to fish, so we need a change. We don’t have a chance to do anything.”

Educated refugees felt that they had learned to fish but were then not allowed to fish and instead were relegated to living in the camps, getting handouts to eat. If camps are, as Elizabeth Cullen Dunn says, “an engine” that “keep[s] people frozen at the cusp of futures just out of reach” (2017), then refugee schools are a particularly acute manifestation of that engine. Teleological time in refugee camps, as with other settings in which the developmental ethos is predominant, was put forward as the norm that everyone should strive toward. And yet teleological time promoted through schooling in the camps did not provide a return on its investment or hold true to its powerful promises.

Teleological violence and its relationship with the sense of an aborted future are illustrated in the stories of Berihu and Gerie, who attended university together; both experienced teleological violence in different ways. Berihu’s story, which we detail more in the next chapter, illustrates the traumas of empty, endless time and of teleological violence. During one of our conversations with him, he shared a picture of friends—seven polished young men—in his graduating class. As graduation neared, refugee students had meetings about their future every three months, asking each other, “Where will we go from here?” After graduation, all of them but Gerie were back in the camps. Berihu listed their fields of study as an index of their identity and accomplishment, yet the sense of hope and pride faded when he described how they were stuck in the camps, unable to get a proper job or continue their education: “Until now, I was happy to get this opportunity to have a bachelor’s degree. If I got the opportunity or chance to keep on my progress, I will have success. But if I sit here for three years and forget what I learned . . . Nobody is happy after graduation because they returned back to the camp and they simply live as the others. We have to use our knowledge to give something back to society. This one graduated one year ago but now is simply living the same as the illiterate refugees. He gets rations each month.”

His suffering is not just due to his low-incentive wages (about forty dollars per month) but is distinctly linked to his inability to progress despite his educational successes. In the next chapter, we discuss Berihu’s temporal suffering in more detail as well as his efforts to alleviate it through acts of caretaking. Here we emphasize the role of education in producing temporal suffering. Education, both his own and that of the young people he was charged with teaching, was a particular source of pain because it served as a constant, insistent reminder of what he was not permitted to accomplish.

Gerie’s story in some ways could not be more different from his friend Berihu’s, yet the elements of precarity and uncertainty and the effects of teleological violence are similar. Gerie was the educated refugee success story. He spoke flawless English and was bursting with charm and positive energy. He went to a university in Ethiopia under the refugee college scholarship program and started an organization to motivate refugee youth to attend school and avoid secondary migration. He married an Eritrean woman he met in the camps, had two children, moved to Addis Ababa, and was one of the rare few who managed to secure himself a relatively good, if informal, private-sector job.

It was challenging for us to get on Gerie’s schedule and meeting him required multiple schedule changes and a long taxi ride to the outskirts of Addis Ababa, where he rented a unit in one of the newly built condominium blocks. Gerie and his wife had just celebrated the second birthday of their son and the birth of a second child a few weeks before. Their apartment was decorated with colored posters and trays of candy and popcorn. While his wife remained secluded in an adjoining room with her newborn baby, Gerie simultaneously entertained his vivacious two-year-old and engaged us with sparkling conversation and keen insights into the plight of educated refugees in Ethiopia.

It would seem that Gerie had succeeded. He described his persistence: “I am very bold. I see my vision and the people behind me.” But Gerie also had the profound sense of running in place. As with many people who cling to the edges of the middle class in Addis Ababa, his low wages and the city’s sprawling demographics and geography meant that he lived far on the outskirts of town, with an onerous commute to a job where he worked long hours. Time, once again, was a problem: “I am getting tired all day in the school. I am teaching, and when I come home, I’ve got little time to spend at home.”

His time and energy were spread thin as he simultaneously worked on multiple strategies to get ahead. Some of that time and energy went to organizing university students—work that had come to mean so much to him—but he had thus far failed to have the university student organization officially recognized by ARRA, which both limited its effectiveness and exposed structural barriers to refugee participation in civic life. He had also been trying to pursue a graduate degree but was finding innumerable formal and informal barriers. Additionally, in an effort to gain control over his life and to get ahead, when we last saw him, he was trying to raise capital to start a business by drawing on church connections abroad. These efforts required a constant exertion of social and cultural capital and the leveraging of hard-won connections gained through bureaucratic office visits that ate up all his spare time. Time and again, he smacked up against legal barriers that limited the efficacy of the cultural capital he had carefully cultivated in his schooling.

Both Berihu and Gerie were deeply inculcated by teleological time, but despite doing all the “right” things and achieving a great deal of success in education, they struggled to get ahead. This pained them in no small part because they knew that the constraints that the refugee label placed on them caused their failure. They were socialized, through many years of education, to have goals and to parse out their time incrementally on a daily basis in service to those goals. However, Berihu and most refugee university graduates were floundering, living partially in a trauma-ridden past, always aware of the option of leaping to the distant, unknown future of migration. Time back in the camp was not merely emptied of telos; it involved a kind of progressive degeneration. Degrees became stale, knowledge and skills atrophied, bright work opportunities faded. Without professional experience, certifications expired.

Everything about schooling created temporal expectations—having control over time and moving through time in a progressive way. But this teleological time was troubled. Gerie and Berihu felt it was their responsibility to encourage young people in the camps to go to school, but they themselves were routinely confronting the reality that education did not get them anywhere. Berihu was all too aware that he served as a negative role model to youth in the camps and represented the myth of teleological time. This myth was exposed when the illusion of being able to arrive at a bright future through self-discipline and actions involving incremental progress toward a reachable goal confronted the reality of educated refugees languishing in the camps or struggling in the cities. Graduates felt as if they had been tricked, and it became increasingly harder to wait hopefully.

While there was a sense that promises were not fulfilled, often the deeper regret came from an internalized blame for wasting years in pursuit of an empty future. Berihu mused with regret, “We have gone to school. We have followed the classes for twenty years. So, we blame ourselves: Why did I go to school? Why didn’t I try to solve the problem for myself?” In all of our conversations with refugee graduates, they talked about the future as if it had abandoned them and about education as if it had been some sort of cruel trick. Teleological time forged a “cruel optimism,” to borrow Lauren Berlant’s concept, which explains how attachments to an object of desire, an imagined “good life,” are not only impossible but can be injurious (Berlant 2011). As Shahram Khosravi notes in his writing on unemployed youth in Tehran, “To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness” (2017, 72). Teleological time produced and reinforced exclusions, exposing and bolstering the illusion that education provides a viable path forward. Educated refugees were frozen out of the future (Dunn 2017).

Teleological violence did not just result in deep unhappiness; it also led to risky decision-making regarding migration. One of the arguments refugees commonly made for not attending school was the understanding that education would not get them anywhere—that it is just one of the more onerous ways to kill time in the camp. Nearly every time we asked why people were not in school, we heard similar responses. As one refugee university student who was waiting out the summer break in the camp noted, “There are many young people here, but their plans are not to study. Their plans are to go abroad, secondary movement.” He explained that it was hard for him to deal with the emptiness of camp time; he was just waiting and sleeping. He explained that youth who are not in school “are playing football. There is the JRS [youth center] where they spend their time playing billiards. But ninety percent of them are in bars.” This was a temporal problem. His description of activities that fill time suggests that refugees were focused on the temporariness of Ethiopia as a stop in a longer journey. As one young woman reflected about the youth in camp who refused to attend school: “Those who are of age are busy taking care of themselves. They think they are leaving tomorrow. The process may come early, we may leave, and so why worry about education here? For those who are underage, they are dreaming and wishing to be abroad.”

Educated refugees were acutely aware of the way education more often than not led to stasis rather than progress, and they therefore felt the pull of migration. That pull was arguably stronger in some ways because of the pressures of “failing” at making progress through education. The risks of migration were well known, particularly for those who lacked the financial and social capital to fund the journey. Although many of these frustrated graduates do wait in the camp for years, the possibility that, in desperation, they might decide to migrate is a specter that haunts all of them. Berihu told us a story about one of his mentors, a refugee who had encouraged him and many others to go to university and not to migrate. “Because of this person, I did not migrate and instead I went to university,” Berihu said. “But then I heard that he himself left the country. This kind of thing makes you confused. . . . I saw so many of my friends lose hope. Why so many travel through the Sahara Desert—because they lose hope. I stayed here five years. A refugee is a person who is not stable. Everyone is changing his decision day by day.” Those who attend university and return to the camp are not generally predisposed to leave. And yet the pain of coping with time without telos after having been in university often drives them, if not to migrate, to at least consider it as an option.

Futures in Conversation: Schooling, Migration, and the Camp

It was hot by the time the school closing ceremony got off to a start, an hour or so later than it was supposed to. By then, the space in the shade under the awnings made of blue tarps was crowded. Students, parents, and teachers squeezed onto benches that had been dragged out of the classrooms. Music blared over a sound system. Refreshments (tea and embasha, a homemade bread) circulated through the crowd. There was a festive air.

The end-of-year ceremony in Mai Aini camp’s senior secondary school was a teleological event. It marked the end point in the school year and created a sense of progress. It was supposed to motivate students by making them feel like schooling was important, their efforts valued. Lasting an entire morning in early July, the ceremony included speeches by the school director and head of the Parent Teacher Association (PTA), comments from the audience, performances by students, and an awards ceremony. Interestingly, most of the speeches and comments addressed the lack of a bright future in Ethiopia and in Mai Aini. They cautioned students to avoid wasting away in the camp by drinking and acting badly and also warned about the dangers of irregular migration. Throughout the ceremony, schooling was cast as a valiant alternative, a sort of antidote to “deviant” behaviors.

Nothing illustrated this better than a short play that was written and acted out by the students. In the play, a young man cuts class and plays hooky to go to the bars and drink with money he cons from his sister in the United States by telling her the money is for school and assuring her that he has top grades. Despite warnings from his mother, his teachers, and an old man in the bar, the young man continues along his wayward path until his sister calls with news of a scholarship. With great glee, he goes to the embassy to receive his scholarship, but much to his surprise, he is given a test that he fails spectacularly, causing him to lose the scholarship.

The play is a morality tale—work hard at your education and do not succumb to the vices of empty time, because education will help you one day, and it might even help you leave the country. It celebrates the virtues of education, hard work, and disciplining one’s time to attend school. It demonizes the evils of falling into the timelessness of the bar. In doing so, the play, and the ceremony overall, set up education as a moral project in which those who work hard and settle into school-based discipline will have access to better things and will progress to a brighter future.

The play puts the time-space of schooling in a conversation with the time-spaces of both the camp and migration.⁵ Two of those time-spaces—schooling and migration—are teleological, while camp time is not. But the time-spaces of schooling and migration convey very different kinds of teleology.⁶ The former can be equated with modernist notions of progress prescribing a linear movement forward through a series of stages to a known and predictable endpoint. The latter is open ended—the desired outcome is clear but the way to get there is not. This open-ended teleology exists in the space of the distant, rather than the near, future.

Putting migration, schooling, and the time-space of the camp in conversation with each other was certainly not limited to the play or the school closing ceremony. In almost every discussion we had about education, the relationship between education, the empty time of the camp, and migration was evoked. As we explore in the next chapter, the space of the camp is always seen as a temporary one linked to the vices of succumbing to interminable empty time or marked by helplessness in the face of bureaucratic processes. Temporal suffering is produced by this temporariness and cruelties of bureaucratized “care.” Migration, as we explore in chapter 5, is attached to an unknown space and an unknown time; it links an indeterminate space beyond Ethiopia and the camp with a distant imagined future. The school offers up a different imagined future, one which is drawn near to the present through the disciplines and everyday structure of schooling. The future offered up through schooling is presented as an attainable goal.

Ideas about progress are infused in discussions of both secondary migration and camp time. For refugees, secondary migration held the possibility of acute trauma and death but also progress, while remaining in the camp was known to lead to suffering (and potentially slow death) with little hope for progress. Meanwhile, progress promoted through schooling promised to offer a leg up and over these impasses but did not. Each time we returned to the camps, we learned about students who had succumbed to one or the other pathway, leaving people behind them a little less certain—or forcing them to shore up their own resolve about the path they were on. This, perhaps, is where teleological violence poses the greatest risk of physical violence to refugees. When educated refugees abandon the hopes for the future their education has promised them, they are posed with a choice, much as the character in the school play is depicted as having a choice: abandon hope for progress and succumb to the dangers of empty camp time or hold on to hopes for progress and face the severe risks of migration as the only remaining possible pathway. Some refugees, however, were seeking out alternative ways to make time by engaging in the politics of reclaiming teleological time on their own terms.

Time-Making and the Politics of Reclaiming Teleological Time

Teleological violence does not simply entail being highly educated so that one can face the precarity of incentive work in the camps. It is also working so hard to graduate and facing the shame of borrowing a suit for the final presentation or achieving top grades and finding there is no trophy for you after all, simply because you are a refugee. It is being told that you are lucky to have these opportunities but not having anyone concerned that the implementation of opportunities winds up placing you at a disadvantage because you arrived to school months late and did not receive a sufficient stipend to purchase materials to study. Teleological violence reveals that the best-laid plans for refugee care become plans for refugee containment, reinforcing lines of social difference and generating political and economic vulnerability. And yet refugees did constantly push back against their relegation to the empty time of the camp and against teleological violence.

The temporality of educational teleology required and expected that students were good at planning, goal setting, and managing time. Indeed, these are integral to what it means to be a “good student.” However, the experience of being a refugee—specifically refugees’ lack of control over time—works against the utilization of these skills.⁷ One of the reasons teleologies are harmful is because there are so many temporal barriers to refugees’ achieving their goals. We have seen several examples of these barriers throughout this chapter. Refugees are not without agency, but they have to go beyond being planful and organized to enact temporal agency. They have to be more than managers of time; they have to be makers of time. They turn to activism in an attempt to lay claim to their right to progress and to make teleological time work for—rather than against—them.

In conclusion, let’s return to that attendance chart we problematized earlier in this chapter. Every chance we got, we continued to ask why enrollments among refugees were so low. Why had they fallen so suddenly in that particular year? If schooling was such a great opportunity, why had enrollments not risen again? Repeatedly people responded to our question with two answers: onward movement and hopelessness. Both are true, but finally, after over a year of asking, we got an answer that specifies teleological violence and complicates our understanding of the relationship between schooling, the camp, hopelessness, onward movement, and refugees’ lack of belonging in Ethiopia.

The year that saw the steepest drop in enrollments, 2014, was the year of the Lampedusa boat wreck. Lampedusa was certainly not the first, last, or even most deadly of the many boat crashes in the Mediterranean, but it captured the international imagination. Less covered was the fact that the majority of migrants on that boat were Eritreans, many of them from the Mai Aini camp. Refugees in the Mai Aini camp were outraged and openly protested conditions in the camp such as low rations and a lack of resettlement opportunities. They believed these conditions had directly led to the mass migration that resulted in deaths at sea. The Ethiopian government clamped down brutally on the protests, which in turn led to another wave of mass migration and a general increase in disillusion about Ethiopian goodwill. School enrollments plummeted. We argue that this is reflective of a lack of trust in both the Ethiopian government and the outcome of schooling. The two are connected; there is no purpose for education if the Ethiopian government doesn’t guarantee rights for refugees, such as the right to work.

This brings to the fore the complexities of refugee political action. The subject position of being a refugee in Ethiopia was brutally reinforced, undercutting the subject position of being a student on a path toward the future. “They had hope before,” explained one long-term resident about the sudden and enduring drop in enrollment. “After that, the government and the UNHCR told them, ‘You will live your life in this camp.’”

In conclusion, we want to explore a form of temporal agency, or time-making, that emerges from political action and responds directly to teleological violence by reclaiming one’s space in a teleological narrative. The protests following Lampedusa were an attempt to claim status as rights-bearing subjects—subjects who had the right to a future. It is significant that one of the things that protesters were asking for was more transparency around resettlement opportunities. The firm clampdown on the protests indicated that refugees did not have the right to lay claim to a future. Interestingly, the response after the protests was to abandon the institution often most closely associated with producing the future: schools.

Since the Lampedusa protests, refugees have been cautious about political organizing but have not failed to organize themselves, as doing so gives them a sense of dignity and purpose that we might argue forged an alternate teleology. They might not be able to get jobs or advance their education beyond the postsecondary level (and thereby will be blocked from continuing on an imagined trajectory toward material success). However, they can use their clout as students and graduates, their confidence, their sense of themselves as leaders, their communication skills, and, at times, their contacts to forge an alternate teleology, demand dignity, and serve as role models. Educated refugees claim a leadership role on the basis of being educated. None of this is a replacement for the stability or livelihoods denied them, but it is a way of claiming agency amid severe structural barriers. We suggest that such organizing efforts are an attempt to reclaim the right to progress, to forge a pathway to a meaningful future, and to carve out a special role for educated refugees.

One of these organizing efforts resulted in the formation of the Eritrean Refugee University Student Association (ERUSA) in 2015. One of the founders of ERUSA described the motivation that drove him to form the organization with other students at Adigrat University: “As educated people in our community, we began talking about our future. It was very heavy. People were dying in the sea, even students who had been with us. What do we do? Do we just keep working for other organizations? At least let’s give some advice to the unaccompanied youth. Let’s share our love. They are away from family, far from older brothers. Let’s be their older brothers.”

He described this work as meeting the needs of both the unaccompanied youth and the refugee college students: “We can be of some service and ask some privileges from other organizations and governments. We are suffering from lack of opportunities. So, let’s ask the UN, NGOs, the Government of Ethiopia. If a friend of ours graduates and is just here in the camp, not allowed to work, he goes to the Mediterranean Sea—sinking there. Let’s help our community and be helped by others.”

The organization quickly expanded to include Eritrean refugee students at other campuses in the Tigray region and those who attend the University of Addis Ababa in the capital city. Most of the nearly one hundred members loosely organized via a social media app that allowed students to pose questions and share experiences and advice. For some of these students, their membership was more about support than political organizing. However, more formal leadership structures took shape at campuses with a larger population of refugee students, and these groups were more expressly political and more active in attempting to attract resources and recognition from the humanitarian aid industry.

In the summer of 2016, members of ERUSA partnered with the Norwegian Refugee Council to conduct workshops with youth in the camps, a project they extended in 2017 with funding from UNHCR. They arranged a sports festival for youth in two camps and in surrounding villages to create opportunities for positive interaction and community building. They also conducted three workshops in Mai Aini to address what they felt were the most pressing topics facing youth in the camps: the danger of addiction, the usefulness of education, and the risks of secondary migration. During the school year, they organized after-school tutoring for elementary children using resources they were able to secure from a church abroad. More recent efforts have involved a public health campaign to educate refugees in the camps about COVID-19. Access to external resources has been sporadic, however. ERUSA’s application for the small summer grant from UNHCR was unsuccessful in 2018, and despite repeated office visits to ARRA officials in Tigray and Addis Ababa, the group did not gain recognition as a formal organization from the Ethiopian government. Indeed, ERUSA’s activities in the camps have been heavily surveilled. As such, the organization has tended to shift in membership and orientation as varied cohorts of students enter and leave the university. And, as a result of the difficulties communicating across great distances with few resources to meet in person and sporadically available internet, more than one manifestation of ERUSA emerged.

The work of ERUSA blended ethical, social, and political commitments, thereby crafting an alternate narrative of the role of educated refugees in the region. They framed their work with Ethiopian communities as a kind of grassroots diplomacy rather than a form of local integration. When the organization formed at Adigrat University, one of their first initiatives involved designing a campus greening project with the goal of contributing to the local community—a goal that was similarly embedded in the sports events. These objectives involved a long-term vision for their own role in the region. As one leader explained, “We can preserve our resources, the educated scholars, if God willing a change happens in our country. We can preserve it right here.” The work with community building, social organizing, and networking links directly to an imagined future of political transformation. If humanitarian borderwork depoliticizes the effort to stem secondary migration as a kind of “compassionate” act of saving the individual lives of young refugees, ERUSA explores the politics of staying close to home, the collective impacts of migration, and the stakes of building positive relations with local border communities that have oscillated between enemies, friends, and brothers during a tumultuous history.

Eritrean student groups on various university campuses also organized to push back against the structural barriers imposed by a slow-acting bureaucracy. On Axum University’s campus, they formed a group and elected leaders who approached the university administration to ask to be admitted to class, despite the fact that they had arrived late and the school did not want to enroll them. They also asked for support given that they had missed two months of class, did not speak the language that many classes were taught in, and often ran out of money before they could photocopy their course materials. This same group was working to create a direct line of communication with ARRA to ensure that ARRA was also trying to better support them and ensure their success.

Although these organizing efforts may have had limited success in terms of stemming onward movement and securing future opportunities for refugees, they were important in other ways. They were acts of temporal agency—time-making—that asserted that refugees were subjects who had the right to a future. Although this refusal to abandon teleological aspirations was one of the things that made teleologies painful, it also restored dignity, a sense of purpose, and a sense of agency over forward-moving progress. Even if refugee university students could not go on to graduate school, move to another country, or get a job, they could use their special status as educated people to help their community and that of their Ethiopian neighbors. They could advocate for their right to a future.

Notes

1. The notion of something you work hard to accomplish harming you is similar to Lauren Berlant’s (2011) concept of “cruel optimism.” Like cruel optimism, teleological violence incentivizes and disciplines people to act in particular ways, making them hopeful and expectant of outcomes that remain out of reach due to substantial structural barriers. The facet of teleological violence we discuss in this chapter resonates with this notion of the thing you strive for causing harm. However, the concept of teleological violence emphasizes the temporal dimensions of striving and also serves to explain why one might respond to this violence either by not striving or by striving in a different way—for example, by migrating.

2. Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) posit that education systems are designed to benefit the politically and economically dominant groups in society for whom formal schooling mirrors their habitus. Students from dominant groups, therefore, come to school equipped with the cultural capital to be successful at schooling. When there is a disconnect between pedagogical style and student habitus, symbolic violence results. For refugees, there is a complex relationship between habitus/cultural capital and symbolic violence. While many refugees may already have the habitus/cultural capital of an educated person, they are stigmatized and often suffer material deprivations as refugees. For example, they may know how to act and dress like a student, study and take notes, and talk to teachers and professors, in some cases more adeptly than members of the host community, but they may not have money to buy appropriate clothing, books, or even food. It is important to note that Bourdieu and Passeron’s emphasis on habitus and what might be thought of as complex, nuanced, “cultural” impediments to success do not preclude or erase structural barriers but do specify their function. We emphasize structural barriers to success more than cultural barriers such as habitus but still find their basic premise that schooling produces false promises a useful starting point.

3. See Dunn (2017) for a detailed discussion of the ways the refugee camp produces a sense of futurity that leaves the future perpetually out of reach.

4. Here we draw on the rich literature on the cultural production of the educated person (Levinson et al. 1996; MacLeod 2008; Levinson 2001). Drawing together social theory from Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) and Foucault (1978) and other work on cultural production and social reproduction (Willis 1977; Bowles and Gintis 1976), this body of work explores the confluence of cultural, historical, and economic factors to show how education, rather than empowerment and the provision of opportunities, has complex effects that often reproduce inequalities while also producing new ways of relating to the world.

5. Our thinking here is informed by Hilary Parsons Dick’s analysis of migrant speech practices, which describes the imagined relationship between different time-places (2010). Migrant narratives place the United States and Mexico in a contrapuntal relationship between “there” (the United States) and “here” (Mexico), which serves as an index for the imagined moral and economic trade-offs of migration (Dick 2018). Similarly, refugees bundle together an array of times and spaces, including daily time in the camp, the time of schooling, and the future-making inherent in thinking about migration.

6. As we noted in the introduction, there are distinct but closely related notions of teleology, with one notion of teleology being synonymous with progress and associated with modernity. A more open-ended teleology is associated with the notion of an end (see Bryant and Knight [2019] and Ramsay and Askland [2020] for further discussion). Rebecca Bryant and Daniel Knight argue that teleology as associated with progress has gotten something of a bad rap and, in their discussion of the anthropology of the future, make open-ended teleology central. In contrast, we suggest that to understand the future from the vantage point of refugees and other marginalized people, we need to put teleological notions of progress in conversation with open-ended teleologies.

7. This is similar to what Arjun Appadurai (2004) would call lacking “the capacity to aspire,” although we note that educated refugees knew how to aspire, they knew how to plan, and they knew how to succeed educationally. What they faced was less a lack of the “navigational capacity” that Appadurai describes and more an attempt to aspire in the face of repeated—and unpredictable—barriers.