“Free of Mind, Though I Am a Refugee”: Borderless Graduate Education and the Politics of Knowledge Production

This study explored the significance of, and possibilities for, graduate education in protracted refugee situations. It focused on Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camps, where just 2% of students have access to higher education of any kind. Drawing on theorization of migrant temporalities and coloniality in education in emergencies, we considered the implications of graduate schooling for individual aspirations and the politics of knowledge production. We argue that, for alumni, Dadaab’s first camp-based master’s program fostered personal development, opened new pathways for physical and cognitive mobility, and fomented refugee-led scholarship and activism. Still, while refugees’ outcomes were framed as collectivized efforts to catalyze social change, they remained deeply gendered and constrained by bordering regimes, funding frameworks, and Western onto-epistemologies.