Paper short abstract:

"Eduscape" - short for educational landscape - remains a useful construct for capturing how educational processes are shaped by globalisation, particularly if it is accompanied by exploratory ethnography to uncover the experiences and preoccupations of people on the ground in the Global South.

Paper long abstract:

The concept of "eduscape" - informed by the work of Arjun Appadurai, and short for educational landscape - was coined two decades ago by scholars of comparative education to capture how educational processes are shaped by globalisation. Yet, there are Eurocentric biases within the existing literature that employs the eduscape concept. The first bias is a focus on Western-style schooling to the neglect of non-Western or indigenous knowledges, epistemologies, and education systems. The second bias is that the facets of globalisation studied tend to reflect the current interests of scholars based in Northern contexts - namely mobility in the context of higher education, and how policies 'travel' in different local contexts - rather than stemming from the preoccupations of people on the ground in the Global South.

This paper defends eduscape as a useful theoretical concept, as long as a broader range of educational phenomena and facets of globalisation are analysed to overcome Eurocentric bias - ideally through the use of ethnographic methods and open-ended research design. I use such data on youth's educational trajectories in Senegal - which were shaped by the availability of Islamic schooling, aspirations to migrate overseas, and intersecting identities of gender and position in the caste-like hierarchy - to illustrate a postcolonial and bottom-up application of the eduscape concept. Through this method, I was able to recentre the knowledges, epistemologies, and forms of education that my interlocutors found valuable, as well as illuminate the kinds of migration flows which shaped their educational realities.