Migrants and Migrations Across the Americas: An Educational Perspective Against Borders

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

In recent years, transdisciplinary work has posed renewed questions about what borders are and what they do. Such inquiries have involved theorization (de Genova, 2015; 2017; Nail, 2016), political analysis (Espejo, 2020), and ongoing praxis.

Educational researchers and activists have engaged and furthered these inquiries. Whether the impact of borders on transfronterizos (students who cross nation-state borders to attend public schools) (De la Piedra & Araujo, 2012; Nuñez & Urrieta, 2021; O’Donnell, 2022), the effects of illegalization, detention, and deportation (Gonzales, 2015; Heidbrink, 2020; Kleyn, 2017), the epistemic marginalization and rebellion of youth on the move (Abrego & Negrón-Gonzales, 2020), or migrant youth experiences and educational trajectories (Dyrness & Supúlveda, 2020), borders cross and cover a vast range of education work.

Less attention has been paid, however, to the specific educational function of borders. That is, borders themselves operate as educative forces. Framings of borders as bundles of social relations or lines of spatial separation do not capture the agentive role they play (Ozguc & Burridge on “more-than-human” critical border studies, 2023) in educational life. Beyond a reflection of empire, more than the boundaries of racist carceral systems, instead of something endowed with energy by border agents or government policies, borders brim with violent life. In this capacity, they enact pedagogies and curriculums. Borders instruct on who belongs where. They facilitate the orders and routines of a place. They direct, discipline, and manage bodies like a teacher in a classroom. People also learn from borders in a range of ways. In turn, borders learn from people and policy. Rather than exploring borders as if they were neutral or vessels to reflect nation-state policies, seeing borders as educational actants opens the possibility to explore how education produces and maintains borders. Conversely, seeing borders as educative forces imagines how study and struggle in formal, nonformal, and everyday spaces might unmake borders, opening toward more liberatory, moving forms of education.

As with any other kind of education, borders are never neutral. Walia (2021) suggests that “borders are not fixed or static lines; they are productive regimes concurrently generated by and producing social relations of dominance” (p. 6). Challenging this dominance, and understanding the oppressive, unjust work of borders, this session takes up an explicitly border abolitionist framework (Bradley & Noronha, 2022; Gill, 2019; Sager, 2020; Walia, 2021). Border abolition is not simply the unmaking of the borders, something that would privilege capital and continue the racialized colonial exploitation of people on the move. Instead of some kind of anarcho-capitalist dream, beyond policy reforms or notions of “humane borders,” border abolition acts toward a future with “the freedom to move and to stay…concerned with presence (of life-sustaining goods, services and practices of care) as well as absence (of violence state practices like detention and deportation)” (Bradley & Noronha, 2022, p. 10). As Walia suggests, a border abolitionist framework “is a politics of refusal, a politics of revolution, and a politics of repair” (p. 214). In short, border abolition builds on a long abolitionist tradition, seeking to tear down the deadly things called borders and make in their place a more equal world. Just as borders act educationally, border abolition is an educational project.

This panel engages critical themes and areas of comparative and international education that are thus far underexplored. First, border abolition provides new perspectives to the field. While abolitionist praxis has recently entered educational research more broadly (prominently, Love, 2019), abolitionist work in general, and border abolition specifically, have not fully entered the field of comparative and international education. Second, reconceptualizing the role of the border is likewise underexplored in the field. Seeing the role of non-human actors in border studies has only recently been taken up in fields like geography. Ozguc and Burridge (2023), for instance, question if “the militarisation of borderlands, increasing surveillance of mobility, growing violence against refugees and asylum seekers, pandemic bordering, and mass displacement can be fully grasped through a singular focus upon the agency of the human subject” (p. 1). Once more, though, these conversations are newer to fields of education. Together, this panel uniquely explores the agentive role of borders, specifically from a border abolitionist perspective. In doing so, papers do not simply add new conversations but centrally imagine the possibilities of challenging colonial structures and building radical worlds.

Papers in this session study borders as educational actors. Our aims in this session are to think like borders and study against borders. More specifically, these papers contend with the making, maintenance, and unmaking of borders as they entangle with education work. Whether the refuge of counterspaces or critically engaging the curricular production of “smartness” as a border for youth on the move, educational praxis makes sense of and helps contest the persistent violence of bordering regimes. Papers consider language, space, and academic status as aspects of bordering and contestation. They show how youth on the move are themselves impacted by and challenge border regimes. Questions are also posed as to whether teachers act as abolitionists or border agents.

The session will include a brief introduction from the session chair, presentations from individual presenters, and remarks from a prominent scholar in the field of global migration studies who will serve as discussant.

Sub Unit

• Global Migration SIG

Organizer

• Jordan Corson, Stockton University

Chair

• Jordan Corson, Stockton University

Individual Presentations

• Recreation and Rejection: Stories of Borders and Boundaries in Newcomers’ Schools - Isabella Devin Bartels, Columbia University Teachers College

• The Construction of Smartness in the College Transition Experiences of Bilingual Latinx Youth - Lauren K McCoy, Manhattan Academy for Arts and Language

• Reception and Accommodation of Unaccompanied Adolescents in Mexico: Pedagogies of Care in Transition - Claudia Triana Ipinza, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Discussant

• Susan Thomas, Syracuse University