Education, Mobilities and Migration

Within the context of increased global migration and mobility, education occupies a central role which is being transformed by new human movements and cultural diversity, flows, and networks. Studies under the umbrella terms of migration, mobility, and mobilities reveal the complexity of these concepts. The field of study ranges from global child mobility as a response to poverty, to the reconceptualising of notions of inclusion in relation to pastoralist lifestyles, to the ways in which new offshore institutions and transnational diasporas shape the educational experiences of students, families, and teachers. At the heart of this new research is a need to explore how identity, integration, and social stratification play a role in the story of global migration between and within the Global North and South.

This volume focuses on three major themes: poverty, migration, social mobility and social reproduction; networks of migration within and across national education systems; and higher education and international student mobility, and the concerns and opportunities that go along with this mobility. The international group of researchers who have contributed to this book demonstrate how educational institutions are part of a common global project characterised by fluidity, how the social fabric of educational institutions responds to demographic diversity, and how new social differentiations occur as a result of human movement. By bringing together these contributions, a number of important theoretical and empirical methodological dimensions are identified that need more attention within the growing field of migration and education studies. This volume shows how mobilities and transnational interconnectedness create multiple interactions that tie our different educational projects together. This book was originally published as a special issue of Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education.

Madeleine Arnot is Professor of Sociology of Education, and a Fellow of Jesus College, at Cambridge University, UK. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences; co-founder of the Cambridge Migration Research Network; and co-author of Education, Asylum and the Non-Citizen Child: the politics of compassion and belonging (with Halleli Pinson and Mano Candappa, 2010), which draws upon moral philosophy to explore government and local responses and refugee/asylum-seeking children’s school experiences in the UK. Her recent research focuses on language development and social integration of Eastern European children in the UK and on the tense relationships between moralities and mobilities.

Claudia Schneider is Principal Lecturer in Social Policy at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. She has researched a wide range of migration areas including German asylum policy, the migration of European citizens from Eastern Europe, and international migration in higher education. She has led a number of externally funded projects on Eastern European migration and is currently co-convening a Bell Foundation-funded project with Cambridge University on the social, linguistic, and educational needs of pupils who have English as an additional language. Her recent research applies theories of transnationalisation and the role of communication systems to education and migration studies.

Oakleigh Welply is a Lecturer in the School of Education at Durham University, UK. Her research adopts a cross-national perspective in order to investigate the experiences and identities of immigrant-background children in primary schools in France and England. She has a particular interest in developing cross-national research and methodologies to conduct research with diverse communities in European countries, and to explore the relationship of education to issues of language, religion, immigration, and citizenship. Using the work of Paul Ricoeur and Pierre Bourdieu, she investigates the notion of ‘Otherness’ in young people’s school experience and how it shapes identity in multicultural classrooms.