Past Event! Note: this event has already taken place.
The Tangled Web Between Refugee Rights, Capitalism, Race and Education
September 10, 2025 at 12:30 PM to 1:30 PM
| Location: | MDS lounge (Richcraft 2404R) Richcraft Hall |
| Cost: | Free |
Migration and Diaspora Studies hosts the Brownbag lunch with Dr. Ritesh Shah, Centre for Asia Pacific Refugee Studies (CAPRS), University of Auckland, New Zealand
Recent discussions within international and comparative education have begun to disentangle the historical and contemporary links between race, colonialism, education, and the ‘development’ project (Sriprakash, Tikly, and Walker, 2020). This important work has shed light on various blind spots, absences (wilful or otherwise), and erasures prevalent in practice, policy, and research in this field (Menashy and Zakaria, 2022). Such discussions, however, have largely avoided discussing how this is also prevalent in the education in emergencies community (Oddy, 2020). Both the guarantee and promise of rights-based provision of basic services (including education to all) in times of crisis, and humanitarian principles of neutrality, independence and humanity have afforded this realm of work ill-bestowed immunity from interrogation (Shah et. al 2024; Shuyab and Brun, 2022).
In this talk, Dr. Shah seeks to argue that the inequities and inequities we observe today in terms of the affordance of rights to some refugees or migrants and not others, can be understood through the logic of capitalism and its dependencies on political and social systems which racialize and subjugate. Two key concepts—that of expropriation and exploitation—discussed by Nancy Fraser (2022) in her book Cannibal Capitalism—will be used to advance this argument. Specifically, the nature of education provision in many humanitarian contexts, has become an indication of which groups will become exploitable versus which groups will be completely expropriated by capitalism’s demands for resources and labour. This is often reflected in: (a) whether access to education, of any form, is afforded to refugees in host countries where they find themselves; and (b) the nature of the education they are provided. Often such determinations are made based on racialized narratives and justifications, deeply imbued and embedded within the humanitarian system itself.
Dr. Ritesh Shah has been an affiliated scholar of CAPRS since its inception and became co-director of CAPRS in February 2025. Ritesh’s scholarship and teaching explores the political economy of education provision in times of conflict and crisis. His work critically interrogates how the competing and varied interests of international actors/agencies, national governments, civil society, and affected communities’ shapes why, how and for whom quality, relevant education is afforded to and not in such settings. Between 2021-2023, he led a large-scale research project titled ACCESS. The project, which was carried out in Colombia, Uganda, Pakistan, Nigeria and Jordan explored what precludes non-formal education programming for out of school children and youth being available, accessible, adaptable, and acceptable to the learners themselves and their communities, and how this might be changed.
Increasingly, Ritesh’s work has sought to challenge the global humanitarian architecture and the logics behind it, which he argues remain grounded saviourism, racial capitalism, and (neo)imperialism. Specific attention within this critique is directed at the education in emergencies (EiE) community, and he continues to work with stakeholders across the sector to imagine how their collective work can be reimagined.
Over the years, Ritesh has worked closely with a range of UN agencies, bilateral donors, and INGOs in a range of contexts across Southeast Asia, the Pacific, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. He has also contributed to global guidance and policies on education sector resilience and recovery, accelerated education programming, and higher education in times of conflict/crisis. He is viewed as a leading scholar and thought leader within the EiE community.
Within his role in CAPRS, Ritesh hopes to strengthen meaningful refugee participation as a practice and way of working, not only in Aotearoa, but in education responses internationally. He also acknowledges that as someone without lived experience, he too needs to shift the ways that his own expertise and knowledge are valorised over those of others.
You can find out more about Ritesh’s research and publications here.