Understanding Settings for Early Childhood Socialization: Evidence from the Rohingya Camps

Since 2019, NYU Global TIES for Children (NYU-TIES), in collaboration with Play to Learn partners, has been exploring ways of better understanding and assessing playful learning in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. A critical part of this process has been an intentional focus on the context in which play, and more fundamentally child socialization, takes place for young Rohingya children. One way we were able to examine this was through the use of rapid ethnographic approaches to describe everyday life in the camps. The research described in this brief was conducted with children who had attended BRAC’s Humanitarian Play Lab programs (HPLs), as well as those who had not. In this brief, we aim to 1) understand the socialization context Rohingya children living in the Cox’s Bazar Camps experience; and 2) explore the utility of rapid ethnography to understand evolving sociocultural contexts like refugee camps, where factors such as economic instability, natural disasters, and the Covid-19 pandemic have continued to change the individual- and family-level environment for Rohingya communities.