Transnational Education: A Research Perspective for the Future? The Example of Education in Migrant Families between Brazil and Europe

Author(s):

Sara Fuerstenau(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2014

Network:

07. Social Justice and Intercultural Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

07 SES 09 B, Transnational Perspectives

Paper Session

Time:

2014-09-04

11:00-12:30

Room:

B005 Anfiteatro

Chair:

Eunice Macedo

Contribution

The paper will focus on the interconnection of transnational family organisation and educational careers. It will analyse educational careers of transnational children and teenagers. According to Katy Gardner (2012), “transnational children can live as part of settled communities with an established ‘homeland’ elsewhere, can move across borders for work” – but also for education – “or be part of families and communities in which migration abroad is an established way of life; whilst some may migrate themselves, others may be left behind” (892). Research findings on transnational families from various subject perspectives show that educational opportunities and social mobility for children play an important role in the establishment and long-term continuation of transnational family arrangements. Educational research, though, has not contributed much to the understanding of transnational families and children so far.

The paper will present a research project designed to investigate the complex and manifold interconnections between spatial mobility, social positioning and educational strategies in transnational social fields between Brazil and Europe. At present, an exploratory interview study is being conducted among Brazilian migrants in Germany that indicates such interconnections. The research project will investigate the following research questions:

In which ways do transnational family organisation, on the one hand, and the pursuit of educational careers and educational upward mobility for children, on the other hand, interact with each other?

What kinds of connections between spatial mobility, social mobility and educational strategies can be identified?

What is the impact of class, gender and racialisation processes on transnational educational strategies and social positioning in transnational contexts?

Relying on first results of the exploratory study, the paper will discuss in how far transnational educational strategies of Brazilian migrants in Europe are part of social positioning. The impact of class, gender and racialisation processes on educational strategies and careers will be taken into account.

Peggy Levitt and Nina Glick Schiller (2004) propose a “social field approach” to the study of transnational migration that will serve as a theoretical framework in the project on migration end education between Brazil and Europe. They define “social field as a set of multiple interlocking networks of social relationships through which ideas, practices, and resources are unequally exchanged, organized, and transformed. (…) National social fields (…) stay within national boundaries while transnational social fields connect actors through direct and indirect relations across borders” (1009). Migrants may belong to various national and transnational social fields at the same time.

Two former educational research projects are a point of departure for the presented study: In these projects, we have found that the theoretical framework of transnationalism (Glick Schiller et al 1997) led to a better understanding of the educational careers of children and young people from migrant families. Both projects originally were not designed to investigate education from a transnational perspective, but in both cases the transnational organisation of families turned out to be highly relevant for educational careers – and vice versa. The projects were on German-Portuguese adolescents and on teenagers from Africa with diverse legal statuses in Germany. Both were qualitative studies (Fürstenau 2005; Niedrig 2008; Fürstenau/Niedrig 2009). For the analysis of the research findings, we drew on Pierre Bourdieu to describe young peoples’ social positioning by educational and cultural capital. National social fields remained important because of the national education systems’ dominant role for the certification of cultural capital. At the same time, though, educational strategies were influenced by the different and sometimes even contradictory social positions of the young migrants in national and transnational social fields.

Method

The research project follows an ethnographic approach (field observation, interviews). The ongoing exploratory study is being conducted in the Brazilian community of a western German city. In semi-structured interviews, members of migrant families (parents, children, teenagers, others) recount their family migration and their educational experiences and strategies. The exploratory study’s findings will be the starting point for a multi-sited-ethnography (Amelina/Faist 2012; Marcus 1995). The paper will include the design of the multi-sited approach. In transnational migration studies, multi-sited research includes data collection in the regions of origin as well as in the regions of destination of migration. Such methodologies are being developed to address the theoretical framework of the transnational research perspective. Valentina Mazzucato (2008, 70) conceptualizes a „simultaneous multi-sited (SMS) methodology“. In her approach, „networks of people linked to each other across national boundaries are the unit of analysis“, and research is conducted with “matched samples” (2008, 72). Matched Samples make it possible to capture the simultaneity and interconnection of social processes in different places in transnational social fields. Not the borders of nation states, but the social networks determine the research field. In the ongoing exploratory study, the interviews indicate the transnational organisation of the families. The matched sample will include family members living in places in Brazil as well as in Germany and probably other European countries. The multi-sited ethnography is designed to reconstruct educational experiences and strategies not only from the perspectives of family members currently living in the country of destination, but also from those who stayed behind in the country of origin or moved to other places in transnational social fields. The triangulation of multi-sited perspectives is supposed to lead to a more complex understanding of social processes in transnational social fields (Mazzucato 2008, 85). In our case, the aim is a more complex understanding of interconnections between migration decision-making, social positioning and educational strategies in transnational families between Brazil and Europe.

Expected Outcomes

So far, the term “transnational education” has mainly been used to refer to developments and phenomena in the area of higher education (Adick 2005). University-based academic careers of the cosmopolitan elite profit by recent developments in the private transnational educational market. These developments can be characterised as “transnationalism from Above” (Smith/Guarnizo 1998). On the basis of the findings from the exploratory study, the paper will discuss a wider understanding of transnational education: Taking the reasons for migration as well as the migrants’ socio-economical and educational backgrounds into account, it becomes clear that the social contexts of migration between Europe and Brazil are heterogeneous. “Poverty” is a “pushfactor for migration” from Brazil to Europe (Duscha 2013, 289), yet qualified persons migrate from and to Brazil as well (HWWI 2008, 6). The educational experiences of the interviewees in the exploratory study, as well as their positions in national and transnational social fields are diverse. Hopes for educational upward mobility are widely present among interviewees who have come to Germany in the course of poverty, marriage or labour migration. They say, in Brazil they would not have been able to afford the kind of school education that the German system offers for free. Migrants from the Brazilian social elite, on the other hand, have other concerns for their children such as their Portuguese language skills. Findings from the exploratory study highlight the different meanings of “transnational education” for transnational families, depending on their social positioning in national and transnational social fields.

References

Adick, Christel (2005): Transnationalisierung als Herausforderung für die International und Interkulturell Vergleichende Erziehungswissenschaft. In: Tertium Comparationis, (11)2, 243-269. Amelina, Anna/Faist, Thomas (2012): De-naturalizing the national in research methodologies: key concepts of transnational studies in migration. In: Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 35, no. 10, 1707-1724. Duscha, Annemarie (2013): „Das ist das Leben. Das Leben in Vernetzung“ – Transnationale Unterstützungsprozesse einer brasilianischen Migrantinnenorganisation und deren Relevanz für die Soziale Arbeit. In: Herz, A./Olivier, C. (Eds.): Transmigration und Soziale Arbeit. Ein öffentlicher Blick auf Alltagswelten. Baltmannsweiler, 273-295. Fürstenau, Sara (2005): Migrants’ Resources: Multilingualism and Transnational Mobility. A Study on Learning Paths and School to Job Transition of Young Portuguese Migrants. In: European Educational Research Journal, 4 (4), 369-381. Fürstenau, Sara/Niedrig, Heike (2009): Jugend in transnationalen Räumen. Bildungslaufbahnen von Migrantenjugendlichen mit unterschiedlichem Rechtsstatus. In: Geisen, T./Riegel, C. (Eds.): Jugend, Partizipation und Migration. Orientierungen im Kontext von Integration und Ausgrenzung. Wiesbaden, 239-259. Gardner, Katy (2012): Transnational Migration and the Study of Children: An Introduction. In: Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 38 (6) (Special Issue), 889-912. Glick Schiller, Nina/Basch, Linda/Szanton Blanc, Christina (1997): From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration. In: Pries, L. (Hrsg.): Transnationale Migration. Baden Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 121‐140. HWWI (Hamburgisches Weltwirtschaftsinstitut) (ed.) (2008): Länderprofil Brasilien. Focus Migration No. 15. URL: http://focus-migration.hwwi.de/Brasilien.5879.0.html [19.07.2011]. Levitt, Peggy/Glick Schiller, Nina (2004): Conceptualizing Simultaneity: a Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society. In: International Migration Review, 38(3), 1002-1039. Marcus, George (1995): Ethnography in/of world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography. In: Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 24, no. 1, 95-117. Mazzucato, Valentina (2008): Simultaneity and Networks in Transnational Migration: Lessons Learned from an SMS Methodology. In: DeWind, Josh/Holdaway, Jennifer (ed.): Migration and Development Within and Across Borders: Research and Policy Perspectives on Internal and International Migration. Geneva: International Organisation for Migration, 69-100. Niedrig, Heike (2008): Transnationale Bildungsverläufe afrikanischer Flüchtlingsjugendlicher in Hamburg. In: Hunner-Kreisel, Christine/Schäfer, Arne & Witte, Matthias D. (eds.): Jugend, Bildung und Globalisierung. Weinheim u.a.: Juventa, 145-159. Smith, Michael Peter/Guarnizo, Luis Eduardo: The Locations of Transnationalism. In: Smith, Michael Peter/Guarnizo, Luis Eduardo (ed.) (1998): Transnationalism from Below. New Brunswick, S. 3-31.

Author Information

Sara Fuerstenau (presenting / submitting)

University of Muenster, Germany

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