In her review of Borderless Higher Education for Refugees, edited by Wenona Giles and Lorrie Miller, Spogmai Akseer affirms the contributing authors’ argument for increasing access to college and university education for refugees. Higher education is a tool for navigating and overcoming the systems of inequality and the social, political, and economic barriers refugees face.

Carine Allaf, Julia Dicum, and Ruth Naylor, the lead editors of this Special Issue on Gender in Education in Emergencies, reflect on the key questions that shaped the scope and development of this issue and summarize the learning presented in each article.

Drawing from teacher and student focus group discussions in 11 urban public school contexts, authors Kathy Bickmore and Najme Kishani Farahani find that GBV is a shared concern, but that curricula and classroom practices don’t sufficiently address the issue or create space for transforming local experiences of gender conflict as a way to support sustainable peace.

Nicola Jones and coauthors share insights they gained from 3,030 student surveys and 40 key informant interviews on the compounding effects COVID-19 has had on existing legal and cultural barriers to education access for Rohingya and Syrian refugees. They specifically note the exacerbating effects the pandemic has had on girls’ enrollment.

In a study of ten countries, Nicole Dulieu, Silvia Arlini, Mya Gordon, and Allyson Krupar suggest that displaced boys who reported learning “nothing” or “a little bit” during COVID-19 school closures tied these perceptions to feeling sad or worried, and to increased violence at home. Girls more often connected their feelings about learning less during COVID with material and economic barriers.

Flora Cohen, Sarah R. Meyer, Ilana Seff, Cyril Bennouna, Carine Allaf, and Lindsay Stark detail how intersecting gender and race identities, resettlement status, prior experiences, and parental expectations created a different route to gendered socialization for adolescent girls and boys from Iraq in education spaces in Virginia and Texas than for their US-born counterparts.

Shelby Carvalho conducted regression analyses of factors that affect refugee girls’ and boys’ access to secondary school, and that of refugee girls and girls living in nearby host communities in Ethiopia. She found that refugee girls seeking secondary education are more disadvantaged than their male or host-community peers by domestic responsibilities and the perceived safety of the community.