In this talk, I illuminate how an exemplary public school in Poland creates radical multilingual and multicultural spaces of hope for refugee-background students amidst anti-refugee narratives and policies, uncertain times of this socio-historical and geopolitical region, situated at the crossroads of Western and Eastern Europe, and facing a humanitarian crisis on its eastern border due to Russia’s invasion in Ukraine. Arts-based methods are called for, especially in research with minoritized populations. In particular, refugees tend to be dehumanized, and their voices remain unheard, misrepresented, and silenced. One of the tenets of RefugeeCrit Theory (Strekalova-Hughes et al., 2018) urges scholars to look for alternative ways of examining and analyzing refugees’ experiences. Drawing upon a humanizing methodology and counter-storytelling, I applied language self-portraits, I Am From poems and Humanizing Multimodal and Multilingual Analytic Portraits to illuminate stories of Chechen refugee-background students in Poland and to humanize the data collection and analysis through centering participants in the process in multimodal and multilingual ways. Guided by the constructs of translanguaging (García, 2009), critical pedagogy and hope (Freire,1998; hooks, 1994), this qualitative study has shown transformative culturally and linguistically sustainable policies and practices for refugee-background students.

Aleksandra Ita Olszewska is a guest researcher at the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo, Norway. From 2021–2025, she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan (MultiLing), University of Oslo. Aleksandra received her Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction with a specialization in ESOL and bilingual education from the University of Florida in 2020 as a Fulbright scholar from Poland. Aleksandra’s research interests include bi/multilingual education, migration, teacher education, humanizing and arts-based research methods, linguistic justice, and socially just pedagogies.