Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research in northern Benin, the paper examines changing relations between education, migration, and rural livelihoods. Analyzing parental investments and youth return migration, it argues that education has lost its promise of employment and became one option among others.

Paper long abstract

In rapidly transforming rural life-worlds of West Africa, education, aspiration, and migration have historically been closely intertwined. Educational success long depended on young people leaving their villages to pursue schooling elsewhere, often accompanied by hopes of urban integration and access to formal labor markets. This relationship has shifted paradoxically since the turn of the millennium. While the expansion of “education for all” policies led to near-universal school enrollment, the generation that grew up under the Millennium Development Goals now faces increasingly limited opportunities for social mobility.

Based on ethnographic research in northern Benin, this paper examines a striking reversal: the majority of young people who migrated to attend secondary schools now return to their home villages. Contrary to parental aspirations that education would enable an exit from agriculture, rural livelihoods have come to appear more viable than precarious and restricted urban employment. These return mobilities profoundly reshape expectations surrounding education, migration, and the rural future itself. “After education” describes the new configurations in which neither schooling careers nor technical training alone seems to suffice to find one´s living.

The paper explores the moral, economic, and emotional investments parents make in their children’s educational trajectories, as well as the tensions generated by their children’s return to rural life. It argues that education has lost much of its former promise of labor security and has become one option among several strategies for making a living, thereby reconfiguring the meaning of aspiration and success in contemporary rural West Africa.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research with Shanghai families, this paper examines how sending children to UK boarding schools reshapes care, family relations, and responsibilities, showing how education-migration reproduces anxiety through aspiration, outsourcing of care, and obligation under neo-familism.

Paper long abstract

Amid the entanglement of neoliberal, socialist, and Confucian value systems, Chinese urban middle-class families face increasing pressure to manage educational risk through private investment. Education has become a central site through which families pursue social mobility, security, and moral responsibility, not only for the child, but for the family as a collective unit. While international education is often imagined as a more relaxed and “happy” childhood, this paper demonstrates growing disillusionment with the costs, intensity, and emotional labour involved in acquiring elite schooling.

Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic research (2019–2023) with wealthy urban families in Shanghai, this paper examines transnational educational strategies through which children are sent to elite UK boarding schools from as early as age 11. These arrangements involve the outsourcing of daily care to schools, guardianship agencies, and institutional infrastructures, reshaping parent–child relationships and redistributing familial responsibilities across borders. Building on Yan Yunxiang’s concept of neo-familism, the paper introduces the notion of "transnational neo-familism" to analyse how ideals of parental sacrifice, obligation, and love travel and are reconfigured through education migration.

The paper argues families navigate an intricate synthesis of care, aspiration, anxiety, and moral obligation. Educational anxieties are further intensified by processes of social and infrastructural involution, as families encounter diminishing returns within the very systems they hoped would provide escape from hyper-competition.

The paper contributes to debates on education, family transformation, and affective labour, showing how global educational pathways reproduce, rather than resolve, anxieties about the future.

Keywords: Chinese family, elite education, UK boarding schools, neo-familism

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper explores the moral and ethical dilemmas of “borrowing time” from kin and the expectation and negotiation of 'appropriate' return, to foreground the temporal dimensions of becoming and belonging among northeastern women moving to the southern Indian city of Bangalore for higher education.

Paper long abstract

Over the last decade, many young people have moved out of ‘Northeast’ India, a borderland fraught with ethno-religious conflict and State repression, to ‘mainland’ Indian cities for higher education and work. Drawing on 15-months of ethnographic fieldwork with college-going women from various northeastern states in the southern Indian city of Bangalore, this paper thinks through the temporal dimensions of their racialised mobilities.

In foregrounding the idea of ‘return’—both as they use education to bargain for time from their families, and as a negotiation of the expectation to return home to “where one belongs”—I suggest that rather than disentangle the fantasies that underscore their orientations to living otherwise and elsewhere from the familial and ethnic ties within which their other aspirations are shaped and constrained, there is value in holding them together. Through this approach, what emerges is a view of belonging that intertwines intimacy with projects of individual and collective aspiration. Simultaneously, it allows us to see how belonging is constituted not only in and through people’s orientations to the past and the places they come from, but also the future, and to the other places they hope they might come to see.

In describing how Bangalore becomes a space of “borrowed time” for young women from the northeast, I thus explore the affective contours, pressures, and moral dilemmas of such borrowing and its attendant expectation of ‘return,’ as indeed how it allows them to test the extent to which such intention itself might be stretched.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines the transnational family life of Chinese educational migrants in Germany. It explores how care is practiced and expressed across borders, and how filial piety, affection concerns, and material interests intertwine to influence care exchanges and families’ understanding of return.

Paper long abstract

In recent years, more young Chinese pursued overseas education with the financial support from their families. The parents viewed higher education overseas as an investment that can enhance the family’s capacity to withstand potential risks. Thus, studying abroad is not merely a pathway of individual mobility, but a family project embedded with investments and returns, expectations and obligations. This paper focuses on young Chinese who pursue higher education in Germany and subsequently remain there for work, examining the care exchanges between them and their parents, specifically, how they recognized and practice care.

By multi-sited ethnography in Germany and China, this paper demonstrates the non-simultaneous and asymmetrical care exchanges among family members. Care is transmitted through emotional concerns, practical actions, and economic assistance. Ideally, parents care for their children, and when they grow old children reciprocate by caring for them. However, family members experience and perceive care differently, which in turn shapes their expression of care. The findings show that filial obligation, emotional concerns, and material interests intertwine and influence young transmigrants’ understandings of return. These understandings do not always fully align with parental expectations and therefore require ongoing negotiation. Conflicts arising from mismatched expectations of return should not be understood as failures of care exchange. Rather, they reflect processes of mediation and negotiation, through which families continuously redefine care, love, and filial obligation. Therefore, the returns of migration and education cannot be reduced to income or permanent residency alone but be understood as part of broader moral and emotional economies.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

This paper explores migration, aspirations, and kin relations via Greek ethnography and bridges refugee immobility studies with Athens school ethnography.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines entanglements of migration, educational aspirations, and reciprocal kin relations via comparative ethnography in Greek educational settings, centering youth perspectives. It dialogues earlier research on refugee youth facing involuntary immobility in transit and informal spaces with recent classroom ethnography in middle-class Athens public schools attended by migrant and refugee children.

Youth aspirations emerge as relational, negotiated through school interactions, informal learning, family strategies, and moral economies of care, obligation, and reciprocity. Rather than linear or individualized, they unfold within families, across generations, amid uneven resources and polarized discourses on migration, belonging, and inclusion—shaped by neoliberal meritocracy, integration ideals, and exclusionary regimes.

Using aspiration, hope, and relatedness as an analytic triad, the paper analyzes educational projects as accomplished, unfolding, hindered, interrupted, deferred, reoriented, or cancelled. From a youth view, these are family projects influenced by legal shifts, economics, institutions, racism, opportunities, recognition, and stability. Successful trajectories—like school transitions, credentials, or language gains—are relational feats tied to collective investments. Disruptions prompt reassessments of education's present and future value.

Aspirations recalibrate via reciprocal obligations, intergenerational plans, and imagined futures. Education may defer for siblings, redirect to skills, suspend for migration or legalization, or consolidate amid flux. These uneven paths reflect family priorities, constraints, and opportunities within polarizing regimes that entrench inequalities by legal status, class, race, and migration history.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

The paper shows that remittances and the resulting access to asset and loan produce unequal education migration pathways and moral expectations of return, shaping access to destinations, institutions, and careers, while binding families across generations through obligations of care and repayment.

Paper long abstract

Transnational education migration has emerged as a significant phenomenon in Nepal as reflected in the growing migration of students, especially to Australia and North America. In contemporary Nepal, ideas of both migration and education are deeply embedded in narratives of modernization and promises of social mobility. Within this context, this paper examine how international education migration is produced and understood as a moral and intergenerational investment and how unequal remittance flows produce differential educational migration pathways. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between September and December 2025 comprising semi-structured interviews with young adults and their parents in Damak, Nepal.

Situated at the intersection of internal migration, labour migration, and rapidly expanding education-migration infrastructures, Damak has become key site where families mobilise remittances, assets, and debt to finance their children’s education abroad. All young adults in this study come from households where at least one parent has previously migrated for work or is working abroad, situating education migration within longer intergenerational histories of mobility. The paper shows that unequal nature of remittance flows and resulting differential access to assets and loans produces polarised educational migration pathways shaping access to destinations, institutions and career trajectories. Likewise, remittances function not only as financial resources but as moral claims that generate expectations of return from young adults through care and responsibility toward their parents and siblings. As such, the paper contributes to debates in educational anthropology and migration studies by showing how education migration interacts with remittance and debt as economic and moral investment.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

In this paper, I examine how anticipation for stable futures is intergenerationally shaped, making stability a key ‘return’ in encouraging educational migration of young women in the volatile region of Northeast India.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how stability becomes a key desire for both parents and young students in the context of seeking higher education in the militarised region of Northeast India. Based on my doctoral fieldwork among university students in Assam, I argue that the desirability of secure employment among young women is intergenerationally shaped, reflecting a broader, collective anticipation for stable futures. Here, parents play a key role as actors from the preceding generation, which witnessed the peak of sovereignty movements, anti-insurgency operations, and consequent political turmoil and economic stagnation in the region. They, therefore, encourage educational migration for their children, including emphasising prolonged stay in larger cities to build a better, more stable, and less disruptive future and consider public sector employment as the ideal pathway to meet their desire for stability. This desire of the parents aligns with the aspirations of the young women to be economically independent through acquiring government jobs once they graduate. This aspiration is tied to women’s desire to meet their own financial needs while simultaneously providing monetary support to their parents. Here, I demonstrate how acquiring a postgraduate degree and a government job among women students need not be viewed solely through the lens of middle-class aspirations for job security or fulfilling family obligations. I foreground the context of a volatile region in shaping generational anticipation for a stable future amid economic and political precarity.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This ethnographic study of Nepalese migrant farm workers in remote Garhwal Himalaya reveals how migrants perceive education as a key mobilizing force. It demonstrates how their long-term settlement fosters uninterrupted schooling and paves the way for intergenerational occupational mobility.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how migration, education and aspirations intersect in the remote and rural regions of Garhwal Himalaya. It centres on Nepalese migrant farm workers, primarily from Nepal's far western provinces, who revive the land left behind by locals through vegetable farming. Unlike short-term or circular migration, their engagement in agricultural work promotes stability and supports family reunification in the Garhwal region. This, in turn, enables their children's access to government schooling and serves as a key motivator in their extended retention. In this context, migrants reimagine mobility as a long-term investment oriented in education and future possibilities rather than mere wage earning. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the study traces how migrants perceive education as a social and emotional investment and how they negotiate constraints to secure their children's continuous schooling in host rural settings. Further, it shows that their children’s academic attainments open possibilities for intergenerational occupational mobility, indicating that sustained residence enables uninterrupted schooling and that 'staying put' can itself be a pathway to upward mobility for migrants.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

The paper examines education as a moral practice through which migrant returnees articulate responsibility and social engagement after prolonged migration in Western contexts. Based on ethnographic doctoral research in Lithuania, it analyses education-based intangible remittances between returnees.

Paper long abstract

This paper analyses how moral obligations, nostalgia and a sense of responsibility, formed through migration and return, impact the involvement of migrant returnees in educational and cultural agency. This ethnographic doctoral research, conducted in Lithuania, focuses on migrants who have returned after extended periods of migration in Western contexts and who continue or reorient their professional activities toward education and culture. The research examines what migrant returnees seek to convey through education and how they give meaning to these practices.

The study is based on the perspective of transnational social fields, which conceptualises return as a continuous and multifaceted process rather than the final stage of migration (Basch, Glick Schiller & Szanton-Blanc, 1994). Education is analysed as a social and emotional investment through which migrant returnees reflect their transnational experiences, moral commitments and relationships.

This perspective allows intangible remittances to be examined as the circulation of ideas, norms and pedagogical orientations that are selectively interpreted, adapted or resisted in local contexts (Levitt & Lamba-Nieves, 2011; Boccagni & Decimo, 2013; Pinkow-Läpple & Möllers, 2025). The paper further shows how engagement in education and culture is shaped by processes of ethical self-formation and everyday moral reasoning, through which altruistic aspirations are negotiated alongside personal searches for meaning and belonging (Fassin, 2012; Laidlaw, 2014). In doing so, it reframes return as an affective and moral process in which education becomes a central site for negotiating responsibility and social participation (de Haas, 2021; Morokvašić, 2004).