CFP Mobility and education in Asia, ASAA 2020 Melbourne

**Call for papers**

Mobility and education in Asia: an interdisciplinary discussion?

Asian Studies Association of Australia conference, 6-9 July 2020, Melbourne, Australia

Abstracts of around 200 words should be submitted to Zhenjie Yuan < zjyuan@gzhu.edu.cn> and Vickie Zhang <vzhang@student.unimelb.edu.au> by Monday 28 October, 2019.

Education has become a high-profile social issue across Asia, involving complex, selective and far-reaching mobilities of people, things and ideas across traditional boundaries and borders. With a broad faith in the capacity of ‘better’ education to enhance chances at upward social mobility, people in societies across Asia are moving from place to place in the pursuit of institutionalised educational experiences, opportunities and qualifications. This session aims to intersect insights of the now well-established ‘mobilities turn’ with studies of education in Asia, particularly given a recent move in migration studies towards embracing the mobilities approach’s fine-grained attentiveness to a world of duration and flows (Brooks and Waters 2011, Sheller and Urry 2006, Hannam & Guereno-Omil 2015, King 2012, Schapendonk & Steel 2014).

Education-driven migrations present compelling scenes of movement across global, regional and local scales, as sites of anxiety and aspiration, mobility and stasis. Education can, for example, be a key element in the production of place, especially in an era of education marketization, city branding and neoliberalization. It is increasingly incorporated into regional economic development strategies, rendering it a source of socio-economic development and reproducing geographically differentiated relations of power and prestige. As sites of social reproduction, schools are implicated in processes of social inclusion and exclusion based on race, class, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and immigration status, especially in societies where diversity is understood through visible characteristics. Educational spaces are widely posited as sites for different technologies of power, in which control, discipline, instruction, negotiation and resistance are intertwined and performed.

The aim of this session is to explore how theories of mobility may be a productive approach to the analysis of educational spaces, including, but not limited to, formal institutions such as state schools, private schools, international schools, universities and other hybrid educational spaces (e.g. home schooling, tutoring, schooling in workplaces, etc.) (Collins & Coleman 2008; Edwards et al. 2019, Holloway et al. 2010; Holloway & Jöns 2012; Gulson & Symes 2017; Raghuram 2013). Simultaneously, the session aims to explore the way educational spaces harness and respond to frictions and flows that arise from the mobilities of people, things and ideas, focussing primarily on contemporary Asian societies. This could include topics such as: (i) the logistics, institutions and materials that enable or disable the movement of people, things and ideas through space and time, including political and geopolitical factors (Bissell 2016, Cresswell 2010, Pottie-Sherman 2018); (ii) the way in which practices of movement are framed, performed and given value within educational spacetimes and beyond; (iii) the attachments and detachments, hopes, aspirations and despairs driving educational movements and desires (Conradson & McKay 2007, Carling & Collins 2018, Robertson et al. 2018); (iv) more descriptive accounts of education-driven migrations, including depictions of educational experiences, rhythms and routines in everyday life and throughout the life-course (Collins and Shubin 2018, Findlay et al. 2017, King 2018, Symes 2007), and (v) much more.

Both conceptual and empirical papers are welcome in this session, including papers focussing on specific circuits or types of movement. Comparative perspectives are encouraged.

Abstracts of around 200 words should be submitted to Zhenjie Yuan < zjyuan@gzhu.edu.cn> and Vickie Zhang <vzhang@student.unimelb.edu.au> by Monday 28 October, 2019.

We look forward to hearing from you.

**References**

Bissell, D. (2016). Micropolitics of mobility: Public transport commuting and everyday encounters with forces of enablement and constraint. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 106(2), 394-403.
Brooks, R., & Waters, J. (2011). Student mobilities, migration and the internationalization of higher education. Springer.
Carling, J., & Collins, F. (2018). Aspiration, desire and drivers of migration. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44(6), 909-926.
Collins, D., & Coleman, T. (2008). Social geographies of education: Looking within, and beyond, school boundaries. Geography Compass, 2(1), 281-299
Collins, F. L., & Shubin, S. (2015). Migrant times beyond the life course: the temporalities of foreign English teachers in South Korea. Geoforum, 62, 96-104.
Conradson, D., & McKay, D. (2007). Translocal subjectivities: mobility, connection, emotion. Mobilities, 2(2), 167-174.
Cresswell, T. (2010). Towards a politics of mobility. Environment and planning D: society and space, 28(1), 17-31.
Edwards Jr, D. B., Le, H., & Sustarsic, M. (2019). Spatializing a global education phenomenon: private tutoring and mobility theory in Cambodia. Journal of Education Policy, 1-20.
Findlay, A., Prazeres, L., McCollum, D., & Packwood, H. (2017). ‘It was always the plan’: international study as ‘learning to migrate. Area, 49(2), 192-199.
Gulson, K., & Symes, C. (2017) Making moves: theorizations of education and mobility, Critical Studies in Education, 58:2, 125-130
Hannam, K., & Guereno-Omil, B. (2015). Educational mobilities: Mobile students, mobile knowledge. In D. Dredge, D. Airey, & M. J. Gross (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of tourism and hospitality (pp. 143–153). Abington: Routledge.
Holloway, S. L., Hubbard, P., Jöns, H., & Pimlott-Wilson, H. (2010). Geographies of education and the significance of children, youth and families. Progress in Human Geography, 34(5), 583-600.
Holloway, S. L., & Jöns, H. (2012). Geographies of education and learning. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37(4), 482-488.
King, R. (2012). Geography and migration studies: Retrospect and prospect. Population, space and place, 18(2), 134-153.
King, R. (2018). Theorising new European youth mobilities. Population, Space and Place, 24(1), e2117.
Pottie-Sherman, Y. (2018). Retaining international students in northeast Ohio: Opportunities and challenges in the ‘age of Trump’. Geoforum, 96, 32-40.
Raghuram, P. (2013). Theorising the spaces of student migration. Population, Space and Place, 19(2), 138-154.
Robertson, S., Cheng, Y. E., & Yeoh, B. S. (2018). Introduction: Mobile aspirations? Youth im/mobilities in the Asia-Pacific. Journal of Intercultural Studies. 39(6), 613-625
Schapendonk, J., & Steel, G. (2014). Following migrant trajectories: The im/mobility of Sub-Saharan Africans en route to the European Union. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104(2), 262-270.
Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2006). The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and planning A, 38(2), 207-226.
Symes, C. (2007). Coaching and training: an ethnography of student commuting on Sydney’s suburban trains. Mobilities, 2(3), 443-461.

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