Short Abstract

This panel explores how migration and education intertwine as moral, social, economic, and emotional investments. It examines how families negotiate aspirations, obligations, and inequalities, rethinking “returns” beyond neoliberal success to reveal moral and affective economies. 

Long Abstract

In a world shaped by economic inequalities and social polarities, the circulation of skills, knowledge, and value reveals both the promises and contradictions of mobility. Adding the layer of education to the returns of migration, this panel examines how families envision, negotiate, and evaluate the benefits of migration and education—not merely as economic outcomes, but as social and emotional investments. Across diverse ethnographic and geographic contexts, we ask how aspirations for education and better futures become entangled with debt, remittances, and the ethics of care that sustain families and communities.

The papers in this panel examine how migration reshapes social obligations related to education, how the value of learning is measured and circulated, and how households, institutions, and states differently define what constitutes a “return.” By tracing these uneven geographies, the panel seeks to rethink education and migration beyond neoliberal metrics of success, illuminating the affective and moral economies that both reproduce and challenge our polarised world.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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