Highlighted Session: Centering justice-, identity- and community-minded migration questions and methodologies

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

In the past several decades, trans/international migration has become a critical field of study across multiple disciplines. At this time of unprecedented human migration, the field of education (broadly conceived) can serve as a critical space for examining how our society is changing and being changed. But how do we conduct such examination? Much of the current theoretical and empirical work on education and migration still employs acculturation and assimilation theories – and related standard methodologies – that may fail to account for variation of educational success and social mobility and/or the racial hierarchies and discrimination that migrants face entering western societies (Macleod, 2021; Zhou, 2015). Further, it may not embrace the potential for learning from migrants and especially migrant youth, who are often marginalized and silenced. The papers in this panel, in contrast, try to account for variation by leveraging the context of reception frameworks, and showing how voices matter in the lives and integration of migrants, including in the education sphere (Gerrard & Sriprakash, 2018; Suarez-Orozco, 2018; Luthra et al., 2018). They present innovative methods such as those incorporating the visual, the spatial, as well as those that are more subject-centered and privilege co-construction of knowledge to uncover aspects and realities that are not readily apparent.

Paper topics cross and question borders and space—physical, theoretical, relational, methodological, cognitive, symbolic, emotional, material. To explore these topics, research design(s) and method(s) were selected, adapted, tweaked, invented, combined and suggested to attempt a deep, complex, multifaceted understanding of the migration phenomena under study. The research approaches seek to meaningfully comprehend some of the intricate spatial, relational, trans/inter/multi/pluri-cultural, sociopolitical, geographical intersections and interruptions, confluences and ruptures that occur throughout and within a migration experience. As an outgrowth of a recently published edited volume, (Re)Mapping Migration and Education (Brill), this panel includes authors and editors from the book who are continuing to investigate migration and education through innovative methods in furtherance of critical, power-attentive research aims.

Sub Unit

• Global Migration SIG

Chair

• Cathryn Magno, University of Fribourg

Individual Presentations

• “Why do I live here?”: Using identity mapping to explore embodied experiences of racialization - Iram Khawaja, Department of Education - Aarhus University

• Picturing community: Exploring migration-shaping through contemporary archeology, spacial relations and visual methodology - Cathryn Magno, University of Fribourg

Discussant

• Anna Becker, University of Fribourg