Short Abstract

This panel explores education as a lived site through which aspirations, exclusions and inequalities are produced and experienced. The panel also turns to the question of possibility: what forms of transformation, connection, and creativity emerge from the very conditions of polarised futures?

Long Abstract

This panel explores how education becomes a lived site through which aspirations, exclusions, and inequalities are produced and experienced. The papers in this panel will examine how families and communities navigate the moral and material demands of education, investing not only money but also labour, emotion, and imagination in the hope of securing social mobility and recognition in the future.

The panel traces how polarisation might unfold through these everyday educational practices, shaped by socio-economic conditions and kinship networks that can contribute to generate uneven futures. It asks what it means to pursue education amid both scarcity and abundance, and how these pursuits create futures that are at once imagined, desired, and unequally attainable. Rather than treating inequality as a fixed condition, the panel approaches it as a process continually reproduced alongside shifting state policies, market logics, and global hierarchies.

At a time when social and material worlds appear increasingly divided—the panel also turns to the question of possibility: what forms of transformation, connection, and creativity might emerge from the very conditions of polarised futures?

This Panel has 3 pending paper proposals.
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