Mobility, Education and Life Trajectories ─ New and Old Migratory Pathways

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.

Karen Valentin is Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Anthropology, School of Education, at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research areas are education, migration, urban life, and youth, based on fieldwork in Nepal, India, Vietnam, and Denmark.

Karen Fog Olwig is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She has extensive research experience of studying family and kinship in processes of migration, in both a Caribbean and a Danish context.