Paper short abstract:

This paper explores notions and experiences of 'discipline' in the educational 'return' of youth from the USA and UK to Nigerian boarding schools. Exploring distinct generational notions of disciplined subjectivities and analysing disciplinary social forces adds to understanding of the practice.

Paper long abstract:

This paper, based on intergenerational research in the Nigerian diaspora, and pilot research in Nigeria, explores the 'return' mobilities of teenagers from the USA and UK to Nigerian boarding schools. This practice reflects transnationally-oriented parenting projects which aim to inculcate dispositions for both high educational attainment in the west and culturally-valued norms such as elder-respect and moral discipline (Coe & Shani, 2015). This paper focuses on notions and experiences of 'discipline' in this practice for parents and youth. A significant number of those sent to Nigeria are young men in 'trouble at school', often 'sent back' involuntarily. This parental 'displacement-as-discipline' sees strict control over young people's bodies as a means to produce desired moral subjects. However, the 'disciplinary parent' must be understood amid the disciplinary western nation-state, responding to immigrant families unforgivingly, and disciplinary educational systems which give few 'second chances' to racialised and classed youth (Bledsoe & Sow, 2011). Thus, educational return can be understood as a strategy to protect chances for social mobility, and as emerging at the juncture where high aspirations of Nigerian parents meet marginalizing forces around gender, race and class in the USA and UK. Young people's perspectives largely resist views of themselves as in need of disciplining, and find 'return' difficult. However, they often rework the experience to express gains of becoming self-disciplined and flexible, which plug into their own high ambitions. Thus, exploring 'discipline' in this practice reveals distinct but shared intergenerational visions for social mobility and the precarious pathway towards it.