Educational Friction: Striated Routes, Transition Velocity, and Value Recuperation among Singaporean Private Degree Students

ABSTRACT

This article offers the concept of ‘educational friction’ as a way to depart from the dominant lens of analysis that privileges mobility as a valued way of life in young people’s experiences of higher education. It does this through three analytic interventions. First, it steers away from the mobility optic that currently predominates analysis in extant educational im/mobilities literature. Second, it acknowledges the emergent and contested nature of (classed) value accorded to mobility and immobility. Third, it attends to a wide range of subjectivities that are folded into and unfolded from ostensibly immobile conditions. To demonstrate this, the article draws on an 11-month ethnographic fieldwork conducted with domestic students in Singapore’s private higher education between 2013 and 2015.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• education migration
• higher education
• Singapore
• mobilities
• immobilities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Yi’En Cheng is Postdoctoral Fellow based in Division of Social Sciences at Yale-NUS College Singapore. He is Associate at Asian Migration cluster, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. His research area lies in global education, transnational mobilities, and youth citizenship in Asian cities. His works have been published in Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Antipode, Environment & Planning A, Gender, Place & Culture, and Social & Cultural Geography as well as in edited volumes. Yi’En obtained D.Phil (Oxon) in 2016 and M.Soc.Sci. (NUS) in 2012 in the discipline of human geography.

ORCID

Yi’En Cheng http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8897-0372

Notes

1 Watkins, Ho and Butler (2017) have cautioned against essentialist categorization of ‘Asian’ and culturalist discourses about Asian youths’ experiences of education and learning.