Social Networks in Educational Migration and Lifelong Mobility Projects of Transnational Youth from Turkmenistan

• In Event: Post-Soviet Educational Pathways: Gender, Ideological Influence, and International Mobility

Abstract

This is a case study of international students from Turkmenistan who relocated to South Korea via a federal scholarship program – Global Korea Scholarship (GKS) as part of their educational mobility projects. Created as a form of soft power, the GKS program is known for being competitive and prestigious, with preference benefits in the application process for a point-based residency visa in addition to providing language training, cultural activities, financial support, guidance and mentorship throughout the program from the government of South Korea (Lee 2018). Thus, among Turkmen students the GKS program is often perceived as an advantageous starting point for educational mobility abroad. The collected data consists of ethnographic fieldnotes and photographs from Turkmenistan collected in the summer of 2024 and in-depth interviews with the participants. I analyzed the interview and fieldwork data, including the signs and keywords, through an analytical lens of language ideologies and indexicality (Woolard 2021; Gal & Irvine 2019) and applied them to the framework of structures (Giddens 1984) and neoliberal mobility projects (De Costa, Park & Wee 2016). The results suggest that the institutional structures in Turkmenistan create and facilitate the reliance on close-knit social networks (Giddens 1984) as well as multilingual practices and neoliberal aspirations for educational migration and mobility abroad (De Costa, Park & Wee 2016). This case study leads to a larger ethnographic investigation of the ways in which multilingual Turkmen youth navigate the ambiguities of post-colonial authoritarian regime to move forward with their imagined lifelong mobility projects as transnational neoliberal individuals.

Author

• Altyn Hallayeva, U of South Carolina