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Since the outbreak of the war in April, 2023 1.5 million Sudanese refugees have fled to Egypt. This multi-sited, 4-year ethnography investigates faith-based refugee community schools as interventions to the educational barriers and refugees face in exile, often keeping bright futures out of reach.

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Since the war broke out in April, 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) over 15 million Sudanese citizens have been forcibly displaced constituting the largest humanitarian crises worldwide. Of the nearly 3 million Sudanese citizens who have fled the country, 1.5 million have sought international protection in Egypt. These are added to the hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees who have resettled in Egypt since the 1950s. Sudanese refugees have struggled with accessing public education since their arrival to Egypt. Problematic government policies and racial prejudice against African refugees have effectively barred Sudanese students from national schools. Since the late 1970s, faith-based institutions have intervened to fill the gap in education for refugees by establishing their own “refugee community schools,” are typically staffed by refugee teachers, staff, and administration, shielding students from the rampant racist discrimination and harassment that they face in Egyptian national schools. This paper draws on four years of ethnographic data—including interviews with teachers, staff, and administrators; focus groups with students, and daily observations of classrooms—conducted at two refugee community schools in Cairo, one established in 1995 and serving 312 students, and the other established in 2024 in response to the influx of refugees fleeing the war, and currently serving 83 students. Findings suggest that trauma-informed pedagogies centered in care facilitate student enhanced academic engagement, better social integration, and emotional regulation. Students report gratitude towards their school for allowing them to once again hope for a better future.

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Based on fieldwork in a Hungarian small town, the paper examines how class, ethnicity, and spatial constraints shape parental school choice. It shows how middle-class mobility ideals and safety concerns are reworked differently across social groups in a resource-poor, polarised education system.

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Drawing on fieldwork conducted in a peripheral small town in Hungary, this paper examines how parents with different class positions and ethnic backgrounds make educational decisions for their children within a polarised, resource-deficient education system. While educational sociology has documented the intensification of middle-class parental investment in schooling, research largely focuses on metropolitan contexts where educational options and mobility routes are abundant. This paper shifts attention to small-town settings, where educational decision-making is shaped by limited institutional choice, spatial constraints, and locally specific class and ethnic relations.

The paper analyses how educational strategies are formed at the intersection of class, locality, and ethnicity by examining school-choice strategies among four groups: ethnic-majority („Hungarian”) middle-class parents, Roma middle-class parents, „Hungarian” working-class parents, and Roma parents living in poverty.

Findings show that both „Hungarian” and Roma middle-class parents face a shared dilemma: educational pathways promising future social mobility are often perceived as threatening children’s present emotional well-being, while locally available, more “child-centred” schools appear safer but offer limited mobility prospects. Although the dilemma is shared, its stakes and interpretive frameworks differ across groups. By contrast, among „Hungarian” working-class parents and Roma parents living in poverty, this dilemma is less pronounced; school choice is shaped primarily by concerns of safety. In both cases, the threat is posed by the other ethnic group.

The presentation highlights how small-town context and racialised class relations shape school choice, showing how middle-class ideals and exclusion are reworked in peripheral settings.

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I examine enabling education as a form of care among displaced Syrian families in Beirut amid financial crisis and marginalisation. I ask how socio-material conditions and infrastructural breakdown shape the everyday practices through which families strive to enable their children’s education.

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This paper examines enabling education as a form of care within the dynamics of family life among displaced Syrian families living in Beirut under conditions of severe financial crisis. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2022 and early 2023, it explores how families sought to sustain their children’s education in a context where access was deeply precarious: public schooling was constrained by discrimination and a prolonged teacher strike, while meeting the costs of private schooling was highly challenging and often impossible.

I analyse how socio-material conditions and infrastructural breakdown shaped the everyday practices through which education was made possible, framing enabling education as a mode of affective future-making. Since the onset of Lebanon’s economic crisis in 2019, basic infrastructures have deteriorated, rendering access to electricity, water, and fuel unreliable, while hyperinflation has eroded purchasing power, turning everyday survival into an ongoing struggle and intensifying the precarity of already marginalised communities.

Yet even under these conditions, Syrian families—especially mothers—continued to strive and sacrifice to secure their children’s education. The paper traces how enabling education became entangled with multiple domains of everyday life, including precarious labour conditions, refugee policies, experiences of discrimination, cutting back on food and other essentials, housing arrangements, and mothers’ own educational trajectories. I argue that Syrian mothers framed enabling education as a crucial way of enhancing their children’s future prospects, even in social and economic conditions where the benefits of education remained profoundly uncertain.

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This paper examines education as a lived site where non-hukou second-generation migrants forge upward mobility alongside structural exclusion. It explores how their strategic navigations generate future-making possibilities within constrained trajectories.

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In Shenzhen, China's "City of the Migrant Bird", education embodies the central paradox of aspiration and exclusion for the city's vast non-hukou population. This paper explores how, for second-generation migrant youth, schooling functions as a primary lived site where hopes for upward mobility and urban belonging are simultaneously experienced and structured by the persistent inequalities of the hukou (household registration) system.

While much research has focused on migrant children in Beijing or Shanghai, the distinctive case of Shenzhen, which is built by and for migrants, remains understudied. This gap obscures how polarised futures are configured in a context of pervasive internal migration. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and personal narratives, this paper addresses this gap by tracing how educational trajectories in Shenzhen produce and reflect deepening social divisions.

The paper argues that these youth engage in a form of strategic and future-oriented agency. They treat education not merely as a ladder to mobility, but as a critical resource for accumulating cultural capital, negotiating their disadvantaged status, and imagining viable futures within structural constraints. It concludes that their tactical engagement with education represents a significant, though often overlooked, site of possibility in the face of a polarising urban future.

Moving beyond policy-focused research, this paper offers a micro-level understanding of how migrant youth engage with education. It details their creative agency, revealing a site of possibility within the constraints of the hukou system.

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Urban schooling in India is often imagined as a space of merit and choice. Drawing on interviews with parents in Varanasi (Kashi), this paper examines how caste shapes the lived and emotional world of schooling, producing uneven educational futures even among families with similar incomes.

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Urban schooling in India is frequently framed as a pathway to mobility. Yet these promises are unevenly realised. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and capital, this paper examines education as a lived site through which unequal futures are actively produced.

The study is based on fifty in-depth interviews with parents from different caste groups who are salaried government employees in Varanasi (Kashi). Focusing on families with comparable and relatively stable incomes, the paper isolates how in absence of material deprivation, social and cultural resource still shape schooling experiences. Advantaged-caste families approach schooling with a sense of ease. Interactions with institutions are marked by confidence, and home is assumed to provide cultural foundations required for educational success.

Dalit families, by contrast, encounter schooling as an aspirational and emotionally demanding project. Their educational choices are marked by vigilance, sustained labour, and careful negotiation, aimed at securing dignity, and social mobility for children. What appears as the same educational decision, enrolling children in English-medium private schools, rests on unequal stocks of social and cultural capital and produces markedly different futures.

Situated in Kashi, a city long associated with learning and intellectual authority, the paper treats the city not only as a geographical setting but also a symbolic field in which claims to knowledge and belonging were historically monopolised and are now unevenly contested. Rather than viewing inequality as fixed, the paper shows how educational aspirations and emotional labour reproduce polarised futures, while also revealing the fragile possibilities that emerge within these conditions.

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The paper discusses the views and everyday experiences of 9-15-year-olds in an international school in Finland. It elaborates on the contradictions when an international school follows a national curriculum and describes the diversity among the pupils, and the ruptures in their educational paths.

Paper long abstract

Increasing numbers of skilled professionals move abroad for career reasons. Often, they are accompanied by their spouse and children. Finland, like many other countries, welcomes such migrants. Children’s education is, however, often forgotten when policies are formed to attract skilled professionals. In my study, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in a municipal international school in Finland investigating the views and everyday experiences of pupils aged 9-15 years old. In this presentation, I elaborate on the contradictions within an international school that follows a national curriculum. I argue that many families seem to share the ethos of international schools raising the future global elite but this ethos is somewhat contradictory in a free municipal school. In particular, there are challenges with secondary education within the Finnish context. Therefore, I also discuss the ruptures in children’s educational paths that their families’ transnational mobilities cause, and the consequences of those. I also discuss the significance of class and nationality among the pupils; some parents were skilled international professionals while others were asylum seekers or blue-collar migrants and the majority were actually (upper-middle class) Finns. I therefore ask, for whom the international schools in Finland are really meant and what the consequences of the diversity among pupils are. The presentation is based on an extensive ethnographic research including interviews, participant observation and visual methods.

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This paper explores the self-disciplining and meritocratic pedagogies that dominate the lives of India's civil service aspirants. Based on author’s ethnographic study in Delhi, this paper highlights the subtle and creative ways in which aspirants challenge this and reassert questions of inequality.

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The neighbourhood of Old Rajinder Nagar (ORN) in India’s capital is teeming with ‘aspirants’- young men and women aspiring to join India’s elite civil services like the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). They are part of the nation’s millions seeking to transition from higher education to stable and secure employment—a transition that is as highly desired as it is increasingly difficult to achieve. Civil service aspirants in ORN attempt this transition through the practice of taiyārī (preparing, in Hindi/Urdu). This paper charts how taiyārī is much more than preparing for jobs and careers as it becomes a practice of wider meaning-making and future-making. Part of the author’s doctoral research on India’s civil service aspirants, and based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper focuses on the role of meritocratic self-disciplining pedagogies in shaping aspirants’ preparatory labours. The paper begins by examining the figure of the ‘serious aspirant’ as embodying the doxa of meritocratic self-discipline. Its dominance in ORN seemingly precludes any meaningful engagement with inequality. However, the paper shows that aspirants find subtle and creative ways to rework and challenge these discourses. A key method in this is talking about, and engaging in, actions and activities that are commonly termed ‘distractions’—activities that are deemed unbecoming of a ‘serious aspirant’—though aspirants gradually recover and reclaim the meaning of these ‘distractions’. The paper demonstrates how the seriousness-distractions dialectic becomes a key strategy through which aspirants challenge the discourse of meritocratic self-discipline and re-assert questions of inequality.

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In Lagos, Nigeria, middle-class women navigate uncertainty within and after education through multiple strategies. While valuing education for themselves and their children, they rely on privatization, kin and other networks, income diversification, and non-linear life courses.

Paper long abstract

In Lagos, Nigeria, people face various uncertainties ranging from infrastructure to the labor market and the ongoing economic crisis, characterized by high inflation and ever-rising cost of living. In this context, many have high hopes for education, yet the reality often includes problems and obstacles within the system as well as poor prospects for graduates—a contrariness that Cooper, Alber, and Njoya have recently termed "education alibi“ (2025).

My research shows how middle-class women were well aware of the uncertainties and contingencies within and after education. They saw education as key to personal success and upward social mobility for themselves and their children, but did not place blind trust in it. Instead, they employed multiple strategies, which are the subject of this paper: 1) privatization regarding the educational institutions they and their children attended; 2) reliance on and responsibilization of kin and other networks to cover resulting costs; 3) diversification of sources of income during and after education, from formal employment to entrepreneurship; and 4) the non-linearity of their life courses, including intermittent educational paths, also to make their education and careers compatible with motherhood.

For these women, education was an aspiration and a lifelong process. Education, career, and motherhood were all integral parts of their ideal life courses, which required flexible, creative, and diverse strategies to cope with the multiple forms of uncertainty.

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Since 2017, some fifty Jewish and Palestinian families have been enrolling their children in the same public school. Willing to connect beyond fear and hatred, their goal is to break with Israeli educational apartheid and to bring forward a community-based strategy focused on peacebuilding.

Paper long abstract

The purpose of my research is to examine a socially mixed community engaged in a social reform project, composed of fifty Jewish and Palestinian families whose children are enrolled in the same public school, a very rare situation in Israel where education is ethnically segregated.

Drawing inspiration from theoretical approaches that present schools as innovative spaces (Bénéï, 2008) where alternative pedagogies can be developed (Leroy, 2022), and critically analyzing the concept of ‘community’ (Amit & Rapport, 2012), the aim of this research is to demonstrate – using qualitative ethnographic methods such as participant observation, interviews and discourse analysis – that while the demographic diversity of the school represents a major socio-political challenge, it also offers an opportunity to imagine a shared future.

The common goal of these families is to break with Israeli educational apartheid, which consistently generates socioeconomic inequalities, political polarization, divergent societal imaginaries and unequally attainable futures, and to bring forward a concrete community-based strategy focused on peacebuilding. Their emphasis on caring for the Other, and thus on connecting beyond fear and hatred, deals a symbolic blow to State policies directed at radical polarization through the creation of death-worlds (Mbembe, 2019) and demonstrates that educational sites, even in colonial contexts, are continuously reinvented and can become spaces of material and symbolic resistance.

Empirical evidence showed that while this project certainly federates antagonistic groups around local challenges of common interest, it also generates new forms of exclusion that jeopardize the egalitarian and inclusive community ideal to which they aspire.

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Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper analyzes emotion socialization in a rural East German daycare center, revealing divergences from urban WEIRD norms and practices and underscoring the importance of culturally sensitive pedagogies grounded in local socioeconomic realities.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how children aged 1-6 years are socialized and educated in a daycare center in the Prignitz, a rural district in the East German state of Brandenburg. Particular attention is given to the socialization of emotion, which is analyzed through two theoretical lenses: the emergence of socioemotional pathways and human bonding. Drawing on six months of ethnographic fieldwork, the study identifies significant divergences between emotion socialization in rural East Germany and the normative ideas and practices prevalent among urban Euro-American middle-classes who are also known as WEIRD people (Henrich et al. 2010).

Adopting an anthropological and developmental perspective, the study highlights how polarized futures are continuously (re)created through micro-interactions within preschool education. Whereas urban middle-class settings prioritize self-esteem as a socializing emotion, emotion socialization in rural East Germany is oriented around pride and shame. Socialization practices in the Prignitz daycare center emphasize group conformity over individual needs and interests, guiding children toward fitting in while reducing educators’ workloads.

The Brandenburg Educational Plan (2024), reflecting urban middle-class lifeworlds, fails to account for rural socioeconomic realities marked by material scarcity and face-to-face solidarity. In many respects, the hegemonic discourse between middle and working classes, between urban centers and their peripheries, and between West and East Germany (or Europe) mirror the dynamics between the Global North and the Global South. For pedagogical guidelines to be meaningful, they must be locally grounded and build on established community values, allowing for multiple, culturally sensitive pedagogies.

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This paper examines how grassroots networks in East London mobilise aspirational imaginaries of “inclusion” to contest rising school exclusion through grassroots testimony. Tracing the paths of testimonies across public arenas, I examine how these imaginaries gain (mis)recognition in these arenas.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how grassroots networks in East London respond to the dramatic rise of ‘school exclusion’ - the use of suspension and expulsion on youth - by mobilising to contest educational marginalisation and to activate alternative aspirational imaginaries. In the UK, exclusion rates are at their highest recorded levels (DfE, 2025), shaped by the polarising processes of marketization, austerity and securitisation. Contributing to a localized public reckoning, coalitions of youth workers, legal aid groups, activists and charities are contesting the hegemonic discourses which link “zero-tolerance” and “silent corridor” discipline to high academic attainment for minoritised youth. Using microethnographic methods to explore how grassroots actors strategically enter public forums and participate in deliberations over school discipline, I examine how, and to what effect, the counter-discourses deployed by speakers gain (mis)recognition within these arenas.

This paper attends to a form of educational aspiration, practiced through collective moral labour emergent under conditions of marginalisation, which simultaneously creates apertures for educational justice and re-inscribes uneven institutional uptake. Centring testimonies about school exclusion, I show how exclusion-impacted youth and their allies work to construct an aspirational imaginary of educational “inclusion” by translating lived experiences into publicly legible and consequential claims. I trace the trajectories of these testimonies through newspapers and city council hearings, showing how these framings might be provisionally stabilized in these arenas. Concurrently, these multivocal interventions are guided by an ideology of language-driven change oriented towards a resignification of “inclusion”, and so these aspirations remain vulnerable to institutional dilution and partial uptake.

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Employing an ethnographic approach, this study argues that educational mobility enables students from eastern Indonesia to advocate issues of home villages in academic settings. Academic settings thus become sites of narrative contestation, reflecting a politics of belonging to the nation.

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Higher education in Indonesia is highly unequal and concentrated in the region of Java. This concentration continuously shapes patterns of educational mobility from across the country to Java, particularly from the so-called periphery of eastern Indonesia, including East Nusa Tenggara, North Maluku, Maluku, and Papua. This study argues that educational mobility has functioned as a medium through which students from eastern Indonesia voice, narrate, and advocate for issues occurring in their home villages within academic settings. Employing a seven-month ethnographic approach conducted from July 2025 to January 2026 among students from eastern Indonesia in Yogyakarta, this study reveals both the opportunities and challenges these students face in contributing to academic narratives of the nation from the perspectives of eastern Indonesia.

In this sense, the academic setting has become a site of narrative contestation concerning how students narrate Indonesia as a nation from their perspectives. Such contestation includes not only negotiation but also advocacy about their home villages as parts of the nation, especially how students from eastern Indonesia gain opportunities to articulate their perspectives, how teaching staff encourage and support them, and how their fellow friends pay attention to these perspectives. This narrative contestation represents the politics of belonging, which shapes the extent to which students from eastern Indonesia experience a sense of belonging to the Indonesian nation.