In Anticipation: Educational (Im)mobilities, Structural Disadvantage, and Young People’s Futures

ABSTRACT

This paper draws upon qualitative fieldwork undertaken in Hong Kong, over the space of a decade, to reflect upon how educational (im)mobilities are folded into the structures that would seem to determine young people’s anticipation of futures. It draws upon two large research projects in particular – one which involved children’s international migration in search of education; the other which examined examples of young people ‘stuck’ in Hong Kong and prescribed, by virtue of their ‘failure’ in the school system, particular circumscribed life chances. The paper attempts to change the spatial lens through which international education is viewed – away from the focus on ‘exodus’ (Abelmann, N., and Kang, J., 2014. Memoir/manuals of South Korean Pre‐College Study Abroad: Defending Mothers and Humanizing Children. Global Networks 14 (1), 1–22) towards a sense of ‘internalisation’ (and the impact that international education is having ‘at home’). The paper speaks to wider debates concerning educational migrations (the role of students as migrants) and the formative role that education (both domestic and international) plays in contemporary societies.

KEYWORDS:

• International education
• young people
• Hong Kong

Acknowledgements

The projects referred to in this paper have been funded by the Canadian Metropolis Project, a Killam Fellowship (at the University of British Columbia), the University of Oxford (Fell Fund) and Utrecht University and the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) and the Research Grants Council (Hong Kong) (RES-000-22-3000). Maggi Leung (Utrecht University) is co-investigator on two of the projects that have informed this paper. We are grateful to all the research participants that provided us with excellent data, to Yutin Ki for outstanding research assistance, and to the British Council for its support.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Johanna L. Waters is Reader in Human Geography and Migration Studies at University College London. She has published extensively on issues around transnational and international education and household and family strategies. Her latest book, written with Rachel Brooks, is entitled Materialities and Mobilities in Education. Her current project is exploring cross-border schooling between Shenzhen and Hong Kong.

Notes

1 The term ‘top-up’ refers to undergraduate qualifications and the fact that they can (in principle) be used to ‘top-up’ an Associate Degree or Higher Diploma qualification to ‘full’ degree level.

2 In the private sector, overseas graduates are invariably placed above domestic graduates in terms of ‘value’ (even though most young people aspire to a place on a domestic university course first and foremost). As I explain in Waters (2006, 2008), this is largely because of the embodied cultural capital acquired by students during their time living ‘overseas’. Public sector institutions (such as the civil service, still tend to value graduates of domestic institutions more highly, reflecting a recognition of the competitive difficulties of getting into a domestic university and partly in an attempt to maintain the value of domestic qualifications over and above overseas ones).

Additional information

Funding

The projects referred to in this paper have been funded by the Canadian Metropolis Project, a Killam Fellowship (at the University of British Columbia), the University of Oxford (Fell Fund) and Utrecht University and the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) and the Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee (Hong Kong) (RES-000-22-3000).