Cosmopolitan Micropublics: Refugees, Education, and LOCAL/Global Interdependence

Institutional contexts can be micropublics. Amin terms these ‘‘micropublics of everyday social contact and encounter’’ (2002: 959). Schools, tertiary institutions and informal sites of learning require daily navigation of a range of differences. This paper considers the contemporary context of refugee mobilities drawing on a research project focussed on Syrian conflict refugees in Australia to examine how micropublics can be supported by policy. The project under discussion is also an international comparative project with Canada, Finland, Sweden, Germany, New Zealand, and the UK. This comparative dimension reveals similarities and differences where the language of integration features strongly in policy. The meanings in this integrationist discourse will be examined to consider the ways in which cosmopolitan theory, particularly banal cosmopolitanism, might provide an alternative analytical frame that works with the cultural cartographies (Ros i Solé, 2013) of refugees as well as potentially supporting the dynamic nature of cosmopolitan micropublics such as schools.