Mobility, Education and Life Trajectories

New and old migratory pathways

Karen Valentin, Karen Olwig

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781315474274
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Migration for educational purposes, once the privilege of the upper class, has become a global mass phenomenon in recent years. This volume examines, within different cultural and historical contexts, the close relationship between migration, education, and social mobility. Adopting the perspective that education includes a broad range of formative experiences, the chapters explore different educational trajectories and the local, regional, and transnational relations in which they are embedded. Three key issues emerge from the analyses: firstly, the central role of temporal aspects in terms of both the overall historical conditions and the specific biographical circumstances shaping educational opportunities; secondly, the complex agendas informing individuals' migration and the adjustment of these agendas in the light of the vagaries of migrant life; and thirdly, the importance of migrants' self-perception as 'educated persons', and the invention of new identities, and the maintaining of old identities that this involves. This book was originally published as a special issue of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.

Mobility, education and life trajectories: new and old migratory pathways

Karen Fog Olwig and Karen Valentin

Travel for educational purposes, once the privilege of the upper class, has become a global mass phenomenon in recent years. This special issue examines, within different cultural and historical contexts, the close relationship between migration, education and social mobility. Adopting the perspective that education includes a broad range of formative experiences, the articles explore different educational trajectories and the local, regional and transnational relations in which they are embedded. Three key issues emerge from the analyses: firstly, the central role of temporality in terms of both the overall historical conditions and the specific biographical circumstances shaping educational opportunities; secondly, the complex agendas informing individuals’ migration and the adjustment of these agendas in the light of the vagaries of migrant life; and thirdly, the importance of migrants’ self-perception as ‘educated persons’ and the invention of new, and the maintaining of old, identities that this involves.

Migration for educational purposes has become a global mass phenomenon. Some young people travel as bona fide students who have been accepted at institutions of formal education, making such places of instruction their official gateway to life in a new society. Yet, these young people must often engage in extensive wage employment in order to support themselves and possibly also their families, who may have contributed substantially to financing their trip abroad. Others move as part of various educational, professional or cultural exchange programmes, as, for example, interns or au pairs. While the latter may have less explicitly defined educational goals, many seek to carve out longer-term educational trajectories that enable them to stay on and use education as a stepping stone to furthering their careers abroad.

This special issue explores the varying trajectories associated with educational migration, the local, regional and transnational relations in which it has been embedded at different historical conjunctures and the assertion of new and old identities with which it is linked. Acknowledging that education is not limited to standardised, institutionalised forms of learning, but encompasses other formative experiences as well, the special issue takes its point of departure in the idea that migration itself involves learning processes and that an important aspect of the migration experience is becoming skilful at navigating in different, uncertain and structurally constrained learning and work environments (Rao and Hossain 2012; Valentin 2012; Hertrich and Lesclingand 2013). By adopting a broad understanding of education, it is thus possible to explore, first, how education may attain multiple and shifting meanings depending on the social context and individual life circumstances and on whether it entails school-based learning or other socially situated forms of learning (Lave and Wenger 1991; Levinson 1999), and secondly, how disparate learning paths are interwoven into, and shape, livelihood opportunities (Froerer and Portisch 2012). This issue takes this approach one step further by specifically exploring, from a cross-cultural perspective, the role of education in the interrelated processes of geographical and social mobility.

Bridging migration research and educational anthropology through educational migration

Addressing the issue of mobility from three different perspectives – geographical movements, educational processes and shifts in social status – and the interconnectedness between them in individual trajectories, this volume aims to bridge discussions from the field of migration studies with those of educational anthropology. Although there have been few attempts to conceptualise the role of education in geographical mobility, the relationship between migration and education figures as a theme in the literature in at least three different ways.

Firstly, especially in societies with a long history of immigration, such as the United States, there is a well-established tradition of examining how schools endeavour to turn migrants’ children into new citizens. The field of educational anthropology, with its roots in studies of American minority education (Levinson and Holland 1996), has thus long been preoccupied with issues of social inequality and reproduction in relation to the descendants of migrants. It has primarily adopted an institutional perspective focusing on the role of schools in incorporating immigrants into receiving societies. Particularly, important issues have been whether schools serve as avenues of social and economic mobility or essentially (re)produce existing ethnic and racial structures of social and economic differentiation, as well as immigrants’ own strategies of integration in relation to school educational programmes (see, for example, Ogbu and Simons 1998; Waters 1999; Gibson and Koyama 2011). While ideas of mobility (often perceived of and represented as a lack of mobility due to socially and socio-economically exclusive education systems) are central to this body of literature, it examines mobility mainly within status hierarchies in the receiving society rather than geographical mobility practices involving education, broadly defined, as one of many pathways towards social mobility. Furthermore, it has paid little attention to migrants’ lives and mobility practices prior to international migration.

Secondly, from a historical perspective, there has been an interest in the significance of travel abroad for educational purposes in the more advantaged segments of society. For many years, study abroad was viewed as the privilege of a small, select group of young people who were able to travel for educational purposes because they either had wealthy parents or were the fortunate recipients of scholarships. This mobility enabled them to gain the professional and intellectual skills necessary to maintain a particular livelihood, but also – in the tradition of the Grand Tour – the social and cultural skills associated with upper- or middle-class life. Research has therefore pointed to the key role of travel in the cultural reproduction of the wealthy elite and the production of a professional middle class (Towner 1985; Henry 2002; Olwig 2007). In a recent work, Amit (2010) has noted that international student exchanges at Western universities, which have been expanded and institutionalised through formal exchange programmes in recent decades, are often regarded as a continuation of the Grand Tour because they are believed to facilitate the acquisition of important language and cultural skills. They, therefore, tend to be viewed as an unquestioned good, and there has been little critical research within this area of study (but see, for example, Amit and Dyck 2010).

Thirdly, of late, as the rapid growth in student migration from postcolonial or postsocialist societies has become more and more apparent, there has been increasing interest in the role of education in international population movements. Contributions from, among others, human geographers have examined the significance of both geographical and social mobility and have explored the spatial differentiation and fundamentally unequal structures governing international student mobility (Brooks and Waters 2011). Migration researchers have mainly directed their attention towards the mobility of students of modest financial means who are enrolling in a wide variety of educational, cultural exchange and intern programmes abroad. We suggest that this form of mobility for educational purposes may have attracted particular interest because it can be viewed as a new form of migration by disadvantaged people looking for opportunities in the Western world, the traditional topic of interest in migration studies. Studies have therefore generally centred on issues that have been salient in research on labour migration, such as the impact of visa regulations on migration flows and the exploitation of immigrants. Key topics include, on the one hand, the use of student visas as a means of gaining entrance to attractive migration destinations and, on the other, the exploitation of international students as a cheap source of labour in the receiving societies and the questionable quality of many of the available educational and cultural programmes that seem designed primarily to take advantage of the economic potential of this new student population (see, for example, Baas 2006, 2009; Fleischer 2007; Neilson 2009; Hassam 2010; Búrikocá and Miller 2010; Pan 2011).

The contributions in this volume draw on these different approaches in research on the relationship between education and migration. Thus, they acknowledge the role of educational institutions in the creation of new citizens, the significance of cultural, social and professional skills acquired abroad in the (re)production of class and the exploitative structures encountered by students who often enter a foreign country with limited legal rights and financial resources. At the same time, the articles recognise that migrants may understand and interpret experiences abroad in many different ways. Furthermore, in the face of difficulties, which may seem to make them victims of structures of oppression, they will generally endeavour to make the best of the opportunities that arise and engage in pursuits and relationships that they find meaningful. And when routes of expected educational and social mobility turn into dead ends, they rework social positions and related identities and explore alternative paths of opportunity. The aim of this issue is to focus on these subject-oriented dimensions of mobility as well as the objective structural conditions that impact on their mobility. This means paying attention to the migrants’ perceptions of, and practices in relation to, educational achievement and social status, how they develop through time and how as a consequence of various changes migrants construct new identities or seek to maintain old ones as ‘educated persons’ worthy of social recognition in the country of origin as well as in the society of the migration destination. Basic to this approach is a broad understanding of the notion of education.

Educational trajectories and mobile livelihoods

From an anthropological perspective, education is not just school-based learning but includes a wide range of socially legitimate processes of training and learning whereby members of a given society come to define themselves and become recognised as knowledgeable and educated according to specific cultural criteria (Levinson and Holland 1996). Taking on multiple and shifting meanings depending on context and situation, education is not identical with, but encompasses, the formal system of schooling. This system has been an integral part of the formation of colonial and postcolonial societies as well as the development of the nation state as a political form (Fuller 1991). Education has also played a key role throughout the world as a mode of social and economic mobility for those aspiring to middle-class status, as testified by studies of migration in relation to the late colonial or postcolonial worlds, or educational programmes in socialist areas of the world.

The global expansion of modern schooling in the second half of the twentieth century was inextricably linked with prevailing modernistic ideas of a positive correlation between mass schooling, economic progress and national development (Anderson-Levitt 2003). This has resulted in huge expectations of the transformative potential of formal education on both the societal and individual levels. The growth in educational migration throughout the world can also be seen as an aspect of contemporary processes of globalisation that lead institutions in the Global North to recruit young trainees and students abroad and encourage young people to seek educational opportunities abroad. At a more general level, education is also an integral dimension of the mobile livelihoods and transnational networks of relations that have been important for people in the developing and postsocialist worlds who see limited future prospects in their home countries.

The notion of livelihood (Olwig and Sørensen 2002) concerns not only obtaining the necessary material means of subsistence but just as significantly fulfilling the ambition to achieve culturally conditioned goals regarding desirable occupations and modes of living. Often, however, such ambitions cannot be realised within the confines of the local society or the nation state, and they may therefore lead to extensive physical mobility, resulting in mobile livelihoods. Young people who leave for an education abroad thus arrive with well-defined ideas of what kinds of livelihoods, and associated social and economic mobility, they expect their physical mobility will facilitate. Such ambitions may be entirely unrealistic given the opportunities available to temporary educational migrants. International research has shown, however, that it can be difficult for migrants to downscale their goals because they are embedded in transnational social networks that maintain high expectations of migrants’ achievements abroad (Fleischer 2007; Olwig 2007). Important elements in these social networks are the migrants’ economic and social obligations towards relatives and friends who have helped finance and organise their migration, as well as their emotional ties to their country of origin, where they anticipate returning when they have achieved the desired social mobility. Migrants thus struggle for geographical and social mobility within a complex field of contradictory expectations and demands. They are regarded as key resources in the transnational networks of relations extending to family and friends in their country of origin and abroad, while treated as foreigners in the migration destination and being subjected to tight immigration regulations that may stake out a limited space of opportunity. In this special issue we investigate how this contested social arena restricts migrants’ ability to strive for social and economic mobility and the various ways in which they seek to deal with, or circumvent, these limitations.

Major themes

This special issue examines the role of education – ranging from primary and secondary schooling to higher education, to training for a profession, to participating in an agricultural internship and to being immersed in the culture and language of a foreign country – as an integrated part of the livelihood strategies of the migrants and their families and the hopes and ambitions for social and geographical mobility linked to these strategies. The articles focus on key themes in the field of educational migration and their relevance for questions of social identity formation. The first two articles apply a primarily historical perspective by looking at educational migration through the lens of colonial ties. The articles on the training of Caribbean nurses in the United Kingdom (Olwig) and on the migration of British children to Southern Rhodesia (Uusihakala) analyse two very different kinds of educational migration within the British Empire during the late colonial period. With a focus on migration from Senegal to France, the third article examines the relationship between educational migration and transnational marriage in the former French Empire (Neveu Kringelbach). All three articles highlight the key role of education as a means of creating ‘proper’ colonial subjects, the migratory moves between the colonies and the imperial centres in which this resulted, and how migrants have experienced these moves. The next article (Berg), on alumni from an elite school in socialist Cuba, is also concerned with education as a state project. It discusses the physical and social mobility with which it is associated and points to the importance of social networks and elite identities in the formation of an ‘alumni-based’ diaspora. The remaining articles explore three different kinds of contemporary educational migration to Denmark: Nepalese studying at institutions of higher education (Valentin), Filipina au pairs on cultural exchanges in private homes (Dalgas) and Ukrainian apprentices on farms (Skvirskaja). They emphasise both how aspirations for social and economic mobility are intertwined with desires for personal transformation and how individuals’ social identities are continuously being remade in processes of migration. In the following, we discuss three major cross-cutting themes that emerge from the articles.

Temporality

With their focus on the relationship between mobility and education, the articles highlight the key role of temporality in migration processes in terms of both the overall historical conditions and the more specific biographical circumstances that shape migration. The case studies point to the significance of the broader political, economic and institutional context within which specific, culturally conditioned ideas of the educated person emerge and become associated with cer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Mobility, education and life trajectories: new and old migratory pathways
• 2. Migrating for a profession: becoming a Caribbean nurse in post-WWII Britain
• 3. Rescuing children, reforming the Empire: British child migration to colonial Southern Rhodesia
• 4. Gendered educational trajectories and transnational marriage among West African students in France
• 5. ‘La Lenin is my passport’: schooling, mobility and belonging in socialist Cuba and its diaspora
• 6. Transnational education and the remaking of social identity: Nepalese student migration to Denmark
• 7. Becoming independent through au pair migration: self-making and social re-positioning among young Filipinas in Denmark
• 8. Converting experiences in ‘communities of practice’: ‘educational’ migration in Denmark and achievements of Ukrainian agricultural apprentices
• Index