Paper short abstract:

When access to ascendant trajectories are restricted due to liminal or non-citizenships and economic precarity, some refugee men seek and instigate unconventional routes.

Paper long abstract:

Education is imagined, for many refugee men in Greece, as a pathway to decent jobs, active citizenships and modern masculinity. However, access to higher education tends to be limited to people with local citizenship or official refugee status. Thus, young men stuck within the limbo of acquiring legitimacy as refugees through state approval seek unconventional routes to advance themselves. In so doing, they instigate proactive and reciprocal knowledge productions.

This chapter is based on ethnography conducted between 2012-2018 among solidarity movements in Athens, Greece. Alongside language class fieldnotes, I documented conversations with one hundred and three men from Middle-Eastern and Sub-Saharan countries, including thirty-two in-depth interviews. While stuck in liminality, with ascendant educational routes restricted, the men in this study emphasized their adaptive capabilities, and enacted their identity sensed masculinities as open-minded and morally caring persons. Simultaneously, many sought free language lessons offered by solidarity initiatives to increase their prospects. Within solidarity spaces, where their uncertain legal status was approached with reciprocity and autonomy by existing solidarity members, the men began to reconfigure knowledge production by teaching their own classes, highlighting the diversity of their home communities, and sharing their expertise with arriving refugees and volunteers. As a result, through inclusive practices and care across ethnicities, age, gender and sexualities, they engaged in transnational solidarity networks and increased their opportunities for the future, performing what I call proactive reciprocity.