[Xmca-l] Refugee education and Communities of Practice?

[Greg Thompson]

I'm starting a new thread bc I failed to be adequately descriptive in the
other thread and there are important conversations being had there that
aren't quite relevant to my student's work. And yet I don't want to disrupt
those conversations, hence a new thread.

So to clarify the situation at hand for me, my student is a refugee from
the Middle East who is here in the U.S. and has been working in the field
of refugee education and is now conducting research in that field for his
PhD. He is studying a multi-year program that trains refugees in
entrepreneurship (specifically, to start their own restaurants here in the
U.S.). His basic question is: What kinds of programs can help refugees to
get settled in the U.S.?

He is using CoP as a way of thinking about this specific task of
restauranteur-ship. But he's also kicking around whether CoP could be
useful for the task of moving to a new country/place and figuring out how
things work in that country/place, and perhaps even whether CoP could be
used to think about the task of becoming a citizen to a new country.
Thinking about apprenticeship into restauranteur-ship using CoP seems
fairly straightforward. But thinking about CoP in the second sense seems a
little more complicated. What is the "community" of which one is becoming a
part? Is a nation-state too large of a community to put CoP thinking to
work? Or is it not sufficiently defined to be called a CoP? (and even as I
am doubting this second use of CoP, I can't help but feel that
restauranteur-ship in the U.S. cannot NOT be connected to the question of
U.S. citizenship).

The other thread is not unhelpful for these questions but they aren't what
this student is "up to" in his research (and I generally prefer not to be
too recalcitrant in my advising of students - and, more importantly, I am
not his dissertation chair). I would add that CoP was an attempt to move
away from previous more assimilationist frameworks, so it was a step
towards being more critical. (and I'm happy to have this conversation merge
into that one if that seems like what is necessary). But I will keep those
suggestions in mind as a way of continually encouraging a more critical
take on things.

Hopefully the above provides a better sense of what I'm looking for (even
if that might be problematic).

-greg

-- 
Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
WEBSITE: greg.a.thompson.byu.edu
http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ucsd.edu/pipermail/xmca-l/attachments/20190627/0d066067/attachment.html