Educational Mobility in Asia

In the Asian context, higher education and migration both conjure images of dis-placement, typically between sites of backwardness and modernity, and lack and opportunity. The actual mobility projects of people—whether these involve spatial, social, and/or existential im/mobilities—are rarely a linear movement from the backward to a static modern. Instead, scholarship alerts us to the elaborate infrastructures, intense affects, and myriad human and technological networks that move people as well as the contradictions that mark movement. Hope intermingles with despair, freedoms arise through the strategic deployment of patriarchal discourses, and movement is often accompanied by stuckedness.

It is important to note that while both higher education and migration have long histories in the region, the recent past has seen rapid urbanisation, the massification of higher education, and unprecedented flows of mobility in many parts of Asia. This workshop will explore contexts in Asia where higher education and migration collapse into each other. It aims to curate a comparative perspective on educational mobility in the region. Panelists will consider the mobility desires, migration infrastructures, and conflictual becomings that situate and animate youth and their families. How do gendered people embedded in allegedly “traditional” family and community ties make and unmake themselves, places, “others”, and the relationships between these? How are educational mobilities emergent in contemporary political economic formations similar to and different from earlier flows and frictions, and what are the implications for the region?

The workshop is organised through the Futures of Mobility network at the Centre for Inter-Asian Research, Ahmedabad University.
 
Organisers with their area focus:

CHINA: Willy Sier, Utrecht University, Netherlands
INDIA: Leya Mathew, Ahmedabad University
PHILIPPINES: Yasmin Ortiga, Singapore Management University
SINGAPORE: Yang Peidong, National Institute of Education Singapore

Date: June 23-24, 2022 (Thursday and Friday)
Timings: 11:30 am - 2:30 pm IST | 8 am -11 am CEST | 4 pm - 7 pm AEST | 2 pm - 5 pm SGT