Introduction

Waking up at sunrise in Tunis on the 15th floor of a hotel—the silent city stretching as a white desert of buildings into the horizon enlightened by the early rays of the sun.

Avenue Habib Bourguiba—once the heart of the Arab Spring—for a moment seems normal: a busy street, people passing by, sipping coffee, escaping the scorching July sun. Yet, the heavy presence of barricades, tanks, policemen, and military personnel slightly distorts the view of a seemingly peaceful morning. Their unspoken power statement is obvious—a deterrent for potential protests and an attempt to minimize episodes of social unrest in the light of growing discontent and the anniversary of Tunisian independence. Meanwhile, children in the streets use the same barricades at night as a playground as they jump over them, unaware of their far-reaching implications.

We landed in Tunis as participants of a two-week summer school program aiming at deconstructing the question of democracy and decolonizing knowledge production. The program included small group visits and interviews with local ngo s, political parties, trade unions, and universities. This essay embodies a final reflective moment for us—two educators engaged in secondary and higher education. It is the culmination of ample discussions regarding the narratives we impart to our students concerning those who have been marginalized and forcibly muted. This short essay questions how we re-tell the stories belonging to the ‘others’ once we are back in the classroom. Do we reproduce the unequal distribution of power structures and neo-colonial relations present in the regime of ‘global coloniality’ (Grosfoguel 2007: 219–221)’? If we do so, how do we unlearn the way we teach for our students to re-learn? Do we, essentially, succeed in cultivating enough cultural awareness through our pedagogical practices to facilitate a process of decolonization of knowledge production?

With all these queries storming our minds, our point of departure in our reflection is one encounter and one story about Tunisian illegal migration that moved us profoundly.

A Tragic Story in a Bright Room

Upon entering the office of Mr Abdelrahman, the President of the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights (ftdes), we were met by the fierce sunlight making its way through the windows and the balcony doors of his office at Avenue Habib Bourguiba. The July heat is heavy. The smell of coffee is delightful. But the stories are painful.

He smiled humbly and heart-warmingly upon receiving us—his guests for the next hour with whom he would share his experiences of working with the families of those who ‘never arrived and never returned’ in their desperate attempts to reach the other shore of the Mediterranean Sea. He sat behind his desk as we gathered our chairs around him. Right behind him, an enlarged photograph hung on the wall.

This photograph had a way of touching the very depths of our souls. A middle-aged woman was sitting on the edge of a bed in her purple blouse and black head scarf. Her hands folded in her lap, her gaze turned towards a wall of the room; she does not look at the photographer. The room is simple with its walls painted white and peach color, furnished only with a bed and a side table. Some layers of paint and parts of the plaster have fallen apart, leaving greyish spots on the ceiling and the walls. The window next to the bed is covered with transparent pieces of plastic bags. Above it hangs a small photograph of a young man. The white door is open, letting in light.

Before any of us could ask Mr Abdelrahman about the photograph, he presented it himself to us. He was the one who had taken the photo. He told us that the young man in the photo in the lady’s room was her son. He had left the country as many young Tunisians do in their pursuit of a better future. However, her son disappeared, and she had not heard from him for 15 years. She passed away without knowing what happened to him.

Theoretical Framework: The ‘Subaltern’ as a Locus of Knowledge Production and a Pedagogical Practice

This short essay gravitates toward the concept of ‘subalternity’ intended as a decolonial rather than a post-modern critique of Eurocentrism. Throughout this essay, ‘subaltern’ indicates two distinct but intertwined concepts. First, in its strictly Gramscian sense, ‘subaltern’ denotes a group that was forced to remain silent as it is ‘subject to the initiatives of the dominant class, even when they rebel’ (Green 2002: 2). In its second acceptation, ‘subaltern’ refers to a methodological perspective—a location of knowledge production (De Oliveira & Kvangraven 2023). In this sense, the subaltern perspective functions as a methodology that allows us to shift the epistemic location of narratives about migration. Furthermore, it challenges the idea that there is only one epistemic tradition—the Western canon, which albeit being a point of view based on which a story can be told, continues to assume itself as a universalistic claim (Grosfoguel 2009; Thambinathan and Kinsella 2021). By adopting subalternity as a locus of knowledge production, we assert that knowledge is ‘partial’ and ‘situated’ in power structures that reinforce the us/them and privileged/underprivileged binary categories (Simandan 2019).

In an attempt to epistemologically transcend the Western canon as the unquestionable ‘point zero’ of analysis on illegal migration and solve the pedagogical dilemmas introduced earlier, the concept of ‘subaltern’ allows us to empower silenced voices (Grosfoguel 2009: 15). But does the idea that we speak for those people we believe cannot speak for themselves imply a paternalistic, and colonial Eurocentric epistemic location? Does empowering someone else’s voice position us in a hierarchical relation where we hold the power to choose and decide what stories to tell and how to re-tell them? (Thambinathan and Kinsella 2021: 4). Yes, we do believe that by ‘empowering’ them we deprive them of agency. Therefore, in this essay and beyond it, the ‘subaltern’ has spoken to us while we have simply kept silent and listened to Mr Abdelrahman and the woman in the photograph. Then, we have reflected with them. Through inverting positionality, the ‘subaltern’ has become both the place where we produce this essay from and the ones with whom we articulate the following reflections.

However, as scholars, researchers, and practitioners—we are never completely detached from what puzzles our curiosity. Rather, we are mere re-elaborators of it. Thus, we are affected by what we study, teach and learn in ways that often create an impulse to act (Thambinathan and Kinsella 2021: 6). Acting might mean not only empathizing or sympathizing with our interlocutors and their silenced protests but it can also implicate us to bring about a radical change in the way we teach and learn as an expression of dissent, taking place in parallel to the silent protests carried out by the subaltern. Thus, through the adoption of the subaltern perspective, we are able to question the concept of the subaltern itself in a way that reflects our decolonial and democratic intentions in the production and dissemination of knowledge (Thambinathan and Kinsella 2021; Sadiki 2015; Reed 2013). As the concluding section of this essay elaborates further, this is how the subaltern perspective has the potential to become a pedagogical practice (Reed 2013) that help us debunk assumptions that affect the way we teach and the way we know.

Tunisian Migration and the EU-sponsored Militarization Response

In July 2023, EU representatives visited Tunis to meet with President Kais Saied and finalize an agreement aimed at stopping the increase of undocumented migrants from Tunisian coastlines to Europe (Al Jazeera Staff 2023). Despite Tunisia having been a transit country for migrants since the late 1960s (Baldwin 2006), the migration waves of the last three years reported a surge in the number of people attempting to reach European soil, encompassing not only Sub-Saharan migrants but also Tunisian youth, women, and the educated middle-class (Chemlali 2020; Inside Story 2023).

If there is something that EU leaders fear is being inundated by illegal and unwanted migrants (Mnasri 2023: 1041). This perceived threat of a new migration crisis has pushed EU member states to elaborate a plan to ‘deepen cooperation with our strategic partners’ (Euronews Staff 2023). However, this new action plan has been contested and criticized for focusing on strengthening border control through the militarization of Tunisian coastal areas. This practice implies externalizing the EU frontier to Tunisia, making it the gatekeeper of the European borders and identity in exchange for financial aid (Baldwin 2006; Chemlali 2023; Inside Story 2023). This reactive, restrictive and conservative response is considered to be an unsustainable quick fix that was doomed to fail as it did not holistically address the structural causes driving people to risk their lives by embarking on the so-called ‘death boats’ in an attempt to reach Europe (Mnasri 2023: 1042).

From the EU perspective, migration from North African countries needs to be treated as a quantifiable and rationalized phenomenon that equates to the unauthorized and illegal movement of ‘too many’ people. Illegal or not—this form of forced migration is a survival strategy and an admirable expression of a culture of resistance to extreme poverty (Baldwin 2006; Mnasri 2023). A security-oriented approach with its special measures such as Frontex, detection technology, and the militarization of border control (Baldwin 2006) does not solve the problem; indeed, it creates more distance between cultures, exacerbating a sense of fear of the ‘other’ and causing more suffering in disadvantaged countries.

Most EU countries are perceiving migration and migrants from a purely nationalist perspective, producing narratives that foment exclusionary culture and myopic political views, notwithstanding ineffective solutions such as the latest deal that the EU wished to cut with Tunisian President Kais Saied. The politicization of the issue of migration through an exclusionary political and cultural discourse creates fear within European borders and promotes a Eurocentric and simplistic view that ignores the broader context and the root causes of migration. Noteworthily, these underlying factors trace back to the ineffective economic global designs elaborated in the North that international financial institutions and development aid agencies forced upon countries in the Global South.

However, externalizing borders is a subtle mechanism to escape accountability for EU countries as it pushes their responsibility away from critically advancing solutions toward migrants’ integration into destination countries. In fact, building walls and fences has a clear signifier that entails physical and cultural distance between ‘us’ versus ‘them’ (Chemlali 2023). In addition, externalizing borders redeems EU countries from being held accountable for having contributed directly or indirectly to creating those economic vices and ‘a politics of bad debts’ (Hibou et al. 2011) that left people with no other alternative but to migrate as a survival strategy amidst the risk of death and deportation.

A Counternarrative to Eurocentrism

While EU delegation members politicize the existence of migrants and refugees and instrumentalize their desperation for electoral purposes, on the other bank of the Mediterranean Sea, a generation of young men and women—most of whom with higher education degrees—are forced to leave their country to escape degrading living conditions (Villa 2022) at a time when opting for a regular visa seems to be a possibility only for few. The risky journey that they undertake is a journey of hope out of despair to pose an end to misery that deserves a counternarrative to Eurocentric analyses. A macroscopic and humanizing discourse on migration should be prioritized in order to shatter the dominant narrative upheld by the powerful ones. This is because there is another side of the story, a silent one—one that nobody wants to hear because it is too painful, inconvenient and perhaps, even more powerful. It is the one contained in the photograph, told us by a man—a high school teacher who spends every day of his life advocating for the powerless ones.

These are the people that the Tunisian institutions have pushed to the margins of society and have often ignored the fact that they ever existed. These are the desperate and brave ones who did not accept the misery imposed upon them and dared to change their lives by embarking on an often-deadly journey through the Mediterranean Sea in the hope of reaching the other shore. These are the ones, like the old mother in the photograph, who passed away without ever knowing what had happened to her son. These are the voiceless subaltern—long victims of epistemic injustice—who should be given a chance to tell their own story while us, should simply stay put and listen.

The gruesome reality is that outside the European looking capital, Tunis, and the main coastal area towns—the destinations of European tourists—life is full of hardships for Tunisians. In the last decade following the Arab Uprisings, young peoples’ cries for change remained unheard and suffocated in silence inside and outside the country. The formation of a new elite in the post-Uprisings’ period and 10 years of consensual politics not only impeded the articulation of effective and context-specific economic reforms but also silenced the voices of protesters against austerity measures, aggravating the lives of Tunisians in the most disadvantaged areas (Fulco & Giampaolo 2023). Amid daily electricity and water cuts, food and medicine shortages, no job prospects and the rising cost of living, people have grown disillusioned with the idea that things will ever ameliorate in the country. The past decisions of Tunisian governments to lift some subsidies to fulfil the imf loan conditions, along with cuts in social welfare and the hiring freeze in the public sector (Aliriza 2020)—the country’s main employer—have affected social mobility, once one of the key characteristics of Tunisian society, determining the graduate youth’s decision to leave.

The imperialistic and arrogant Global North’s presumption that the neoliberal model—while failing elsewhere—will help Tunisia proved wrong so far, debunking the credibility of macroeconomic indicators in determining how well a country is doing as those numbers never reflect the hardships faced by its people (Hanieh 2013). In addition to that, throughout the past 10 years, society and politics have grown so isolated and disconnected from one another (Brésillon 2018) that fleeing the country as an individual choice has become a form of protest—a silent one trapped in dry statistical reports and fearsome breaking news about the North African migrants’ alleged ‘invasion’ of the Italian Island of Lampedusa. While on the other shore of the Mediterranean Sea, Tunisia is discussed as a solution to someone’s else problem and depicted as a liminal wall in the sense of an acultural space secluded from the broader Mediterranean region—Tunisians are running out of choices and patience. While as for us, we are still presented with the possibility to do something, at least in the classroom.

The Role of Education in Deconstructing Narratives on Migration

In an attempt to address the pedagogical queries posited at the beginning of this essay, we conclude this section with the authors’ reflections on the role of education in EU countries in countering narratives that dehumanize migration. Educators at every level can be powerful agents for change in distinct ways. We can trigger and guide an unlearning process that will certainly start with deconstructing those state-driven Eurocentric narratives on migration fostered by populist discourses built around the binary category of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. Once filtered through the lens of cultural sensitivity, the myth of ‘someone’s country’ to protect against an ‘outsider’ in a globalized world is likely to be debunked. In addition to projecting narratives that humanize migration—which is a human rights issue, hence, it deserves to be treated as such—culturalizing migration should be embraced as a crucial pedagogical practice in the classroom.

This can be achieved by incorporating a decolonial approach into the teaching curricula of cultural studies. Debunking conscious and unconscious biases toward migrants in both staff members and students should constitute a precondition for its correct implementation (Fulco & Goldsmith 2023). Doing so necessitates the classroom to be transformed into a culturally sensitive space in which we re-tell that story with rather than about the subaltern. (Co)-telling the story of the subaltern has the potential to produce effective counter-hegemonic narratives in relation to migration. By doing so, this process of story (co)-telling can powerfully challenge the normative views upheld by the political elite to which our students are vulnerably exposed. In this sense, it constitutes for us, instructors of cultural studies and social sciences, a valuable pedagogical tool through which we can teach our students how to unlearn those Eurocentric normative views about migration, development and security that continue to fill the agendas of EU sponsored international political economy forums.

This process of co-telling also embodies the authors’ commitment to thinking from a distinct epistemic location and exposing their students to it. Teaching students that the locus of enunciation of pompous discourses about migration by politicians and journalists conceals a political and geopolitical position that reinforces power imbalances not only raises awareness about the danger of those narratives but also instructs them on how to critically deconstruct them.

Introducing students inductively to issues related to positionality and knowledge production, and raising awareness about the implications that the locus of knowledge production might have on what they learn, is an extremely efficient way to nurture critical minds at various academic and school levels. In brief, if we, as educators, expose students directly or indirectly to the powerful story narrated by Mr Abdelrahman, we will enable them to borrow the epistemic location of the subaltern every time they think of migration or re-tell the story.

Additionally, transforming the traditional classes into reflective moments through the implementation of so-called ‘targeted lessons’ can be one of the pedagogical exercises to adopt, particularly in those classrooms characterized by limited cultural diversity. These are student-led class discussions during which we analyze the root cause of certain stereotypes, and students independently identify cultural bias in textual materials, news outlets and audio-visual resources about migration provided during the course (Ҫavdar, Yasar and Fisk 2019: 300).

In the context of the Mediterranean region—a historic crossroad of cultures, civilizations and exchanges where a century ago Tunisia was known to Italian economic migrants and political refugees as a hospitable land (El Houssi 2012)—it is counter-intuitive that migration is not yet taught as a historical and cultural phenomenon of change and exchanges, especially in countries like Italy which brags about its extensive history curriculum and humanities-oriented focus of education. Yet, outside the classroom, we call for a bold epistemic intervention to leave a permanent mark on the education system and pedagogical practices. Impacting knowledge production should not only imply occasionally borrowing the subaltern’ perspective on certain issues as we did for this study, but also letting their stories speak directly to us, raw and unfiltered, as that enlarged photograph hung on the ftdes president’s office wall did, leaving us all not only numb and tearful, but also silenced, with no further questions or comments.

To achieve a shift in the epistemic location by assuming the perspectives of the subaltern, we open up a space for challenging the de-humanizing imagery and essentialist tropes presented through mass media and political discourses about migrants traversing the desert or crossing the sea, evading coast guards and boarding rescue boats. But how can we engage and facilitate knowledge-producing practices that aspire to ‘represent peoples of the region in a nuanced fashion, away from essentialist accounts, stereotypes […] and away from simplifications?’ (Sadiki 2015: 711). Developing new pedagogical practices requires a process of unlearning through critical reflexivity through which we examine our epistemological framework of assumptions and patterns of thinking (Thambinathan and Kinsella 2021: 3). In this process we, in theory, deconstruct the Eurocentric and nationalist narratives and related identities and invite our students and ourselves into a space of ‘in-between-ness’ (Sadiki 2015: 716)— a space of reciprocity where we attempt to restore power balances in order to encourage cross-cultural encounters. In this process, where knowledge production is negotiated on equal terms (Thambinathan and Kinsella 2021; Sadiki 2015), not only does the unique possibility arise to initiate a process of democratization of knowledge, but it also offers our students the tools to become ‘global citizens’ in a context where co-evolving with the ‘others’ is unavoidable (Sadiki 2015: 706).

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, as educators, our role extends beyond the mere transmission of fixed knowledge. By challenging dehumanizing and unintellectual paradigms that perpetuate exclusion and humiliation toward those courageously resisting the injustices imposed by high-level politics, we can actively contribute to fostering transformative change within our societies.

As educators, we engage in protests alongside the subaltern by becoming active agents of change. For this essay, we attempted to borrow the subaltern perspective to counter the epistemic injustice produced by EU narratives on migration and advance more practical methodological solutions. In line with our call for epistemic intervention, we also seek to challenge the ways we engage with the subject matter in our classes, repeatedly asking ourselves: ‘What are we passing on to future generations?’

In this, we invite colleagues to develop pedagogical practices that create space for cultivating cultural awareness through deconstructive approaches and reflexivity. The aim is to fine-tune our filters of perception and understand what we could do to downplay the politicization of misery and minimize the risks of polarization in our societies—locally and globally.

This process requires a phase of unlearning. It is not only a matter of what we teach but also a question of how we critically and constructively use teaching content and pedagogical practices. Unlearning, however, demands acquiring a vision of the future based on a different level of intellectual sophistication, maturation and openness when we meet the ‘other’ and before we introduce them to our students.