Making moves: theorizations of education and mobility

In the last few decades or so, there have been a number of ‘turns’ in social and cultural theory – the spatial, linguistic, punitive and so forth. The application of the word ‘turn’ indicates the achievement of some epistemological breakthrough that has transformed a disciplinary field, altering its integuments and providing a blueprint for new developments. One of the more significant of the recent turns is the ‘mobility turn’, which, since its recognition a little over a decade ago, has attracted considerable attention in sociology, cultural studies and critical geography (McCann, 2011; Urry, 2007). Its underlying assumption is that movement and mobile are important facets of social and quotidian life that ‘sendentariast’ social theory had hitherto either downplayed or overlooked (Sheller & Urry, 2006, p. 208). Although this paradigm shift in thinking has been an epistemologically ubiquitous one, other than in a very limited sense, it has not thus far included education (though some exceptions include the work on student mobility, e.g. Brooks & Waters, 2010; Collins, Sidhu, Lewis, & Yeoh, 2014). Hence, this special issue of Critical Studies in Education which comprises papers from educational scholars who are endeavouring to redress the hiatus, and explore the ways in which mobility approaches offer new and potentially fecund strands of theorising, that attempt to shed new conceptual light on some of education’s most incorrigible problems.

Mobility theory (though theories, given the plurality of its approaches, are more accurate) is predicated on the idea that social formations, rather than being static and immutable, are in states of constant movement and mutability, are dynamic rather than stationary. According to Tim Cresswell (2006), mobility constitutes three interrelated elements. First, there is mobility as a thing in the world, as being measurable and analysable. Second, there are representations that capture and produce meanings about mobility, that are frequently ideological, as in those representations found in law, literature and film. In this, he posits that ‘the brute fact of getting from A to B becomes synonymous with freedom, with transgression, with creativity, with life itself’ (Cresswell, 2006, p. 3). The third aspect of mobility is as ‘practiced, as it is experienced, embodied. Mobility is a way of being in the world’ (Cresswell, 2006, p. 3). Crucially, for this collection of essays, it represents a way of being in the world requiring various forms of induction, training and education, and to which, in a world where mobility has taken on myriad and often, unevenly distributed manifestations, there is differential access. The interrelationships between representation and materiality are crucial, in that ‘human mobility implicates both physical bodies moving through material landscapes and categorical figures moving through representational spaces’ (Delaney cited by Cresswell, 2006, p. 4).

There is recognition under the aegis of mobility, space and time are indivisible, form a critical nexus, and treating social and cultural phenomena as either solely spatially or temporally determined is to overlook the fact that these phenomena are in a constant though not necessarily constant state of flux, for that flux is variable – at times slow, at others, as now, inexorably fast. For it seems speed and dynamism, movement and relocation have become emblematic conditions of late modern society, pivotal to the growth of global capitalism and global culture. Populations, ideas, goods and symbols are forever on the move, being shifted around, between and across nation states, making a mockery of their boundaries. Nothing, if it ever did, stands still any longer (Urry, 2007, p. 5). Moreover, things are moving around at speeds and rates, across larger spaces and increasingly shorter time frames, as a result of a whole legion of technological breakthroughs, including wide body jets, container ships, computers and mobile phones, that would have been unimaginable, prior to the twentieth century. Right from the outset, movement, which tends to be embodied, should be distinguished from being mobile, which is movement that is assisted in some way, most often mechanically, as in the case of transport, or socially, as in the case of education, which enables individuals to mobilize opportunities that might otherwise be denied them.

There is recognition then that social advancement and access to opportunity are increasingly tethered to the capacity to be mobile, in the real and metaphorical sense. Individuals risk marginalization if they remain stationary; more to the point, some are obliged to remain where they are. For the opportunities for mobility are far from uniform: the wealthy and privileged enjoy many more opportunities for being on the move than the poor. Possessing mobility capital is an antecedent of advantage, just as assuredly as social and culture capital are (Freudendal-Pederesen, 2009, p. 6; Kaufmann, Bergman, & Joye, 2004, p. 753; Urry, 2000, p. 2). For disadvantage is increasingly correlated with attenuated and restricted mobility, lack of the capacity to move, to access services such as education. The advent of educational markets ushered in by the neoliberalist settlement has had an adverse impact on educational supply to poor communities, leading to ‘residualized’ schools, indeed, has led to the disparagement of public goods in general relative to private forms of provision (Bauman, 1988). This is particularly apparent on the periphery of cities where many poorer communities are now located, where the dearth of public transport options (also disparaged as second class) leaves many communities ‘immobile’, unable to access the social and the public goods that might otherwise ameliorate their plights. If this is a matter of concern, so too is the notion that contemporary mobility is unsustainable, that the very conditions of moving around, particularly in urban environments, divide rather than unite societies, are socially, ecologically and environmentally corrosive, and more to the point, unsustainable. Indeed, in the last few years, a countermovement has emerged espousing the virtues of slow; it is one that disparages fast in favour of venerating fixity, sustainability and localism (Honoré, 2004; Parkins & Craig, 2006) and which has found expression in slow education movements around the world (e.g. Berg & Seeber, 2016). Indeed, ‘slow’ tends to have a bad name in education, which consistently rewards ‘fast’, the quick learner, those who are quick on the uptake and those who do not stand still but make the most of their opportunities.

Thus, the ambit of theories of mobility is a wide one: it encompasses not just obvious areas of concern such as transport and the conditions of moving around, but also the impacts these have on the allocation of social goods and self-goods in contemporary societies, and how the capacity for movement is a precondition for opportunity, social improvement and advancement. As with other social goods and self-goods, mobility is a key factor in the provision and delivery of education, at all levels its articulation. Students travel to school, on a day-to-day basis, move in and around their schools, undertake travel for educational purposes, move from school to school, from sector to sector, and from country to country to extend their education (see Hannan & Guereno-Omil, 2015). The export of educational services is a major contributor to the globalized economy. In their turn, educational professionals are subject to the movement of ideas and policies that are moved around the community of education, which is an increasingly globalized/internationalized one. Like other professionals, they are also expected to move, to advance their careers (Elliott & Urry, 2010). Seen in this way, education as a phenomenon is constituted by and constitutive of mobility. It takes place over time and in different spaces, at variable rates; it mobilizes resources at all levels and over a range of scales, from the individual through to the state, from the micro to the macro. Its outcomes take time to manifest themselves, to be mobilized individually and collectively.

Yet despite the importance of these insights into contemporary life, mobility has not been the object and focus of much analysis in education. The one exception is the area of children’s geographies, which has given attention to student mobility, particularly that involved in accessing or travelling to school (Fotel & Thomson, 2004; Symes, 2007). In this special issue, we attempt to redress this neglect, if only in a limited way, for six articles cannot hope to encompass the gamut of educational themes that the mobility turn has the potential to invoke.

The article by Amy Metcalfe deals with the ‘mobility’ of academics, who have always enjoyed global opportunities to work away from ‘home’, at institutions across the world, though these are not equally distributed. As Metcalfe argues, such moves are not unproblematic, even when involving, in her case, seemingly like-minded countries such as the United States of America and Canada. Adopting an auto-ethnographic approach, her article documents a range of adjustments to her academic and civic identity that took place over almost a decade of working and living in Canada. Metcalfe’s argument is that academic mobility is not only the outcome of national innovation and economic competitiveness strategies, but also about the conditions for epistemic and ontological change at the level of the individual. The paper includes a personal account of the nomadic political ontology of academic mobility to exemplify the interrelationships between nationalism, academic belonging and transnationalism. This personal reflection, guided by nomadic theory and post-structural possibilities, offers a viewpoint of the academic profession that provides a different take on academic mobility.

In contrast, Susan Hopkins and Helen Farley’s paper examines the plight of the most immobile members of the meritocracy, those located at the furthest, least accessible reaches of the educational spectrum, those locked away, in increasing numbers, in prisons and other correctional facilities, where denial of mobility is used punitively. This has devastating consequences, so Hopkins and Farley argue, on the part of those prisoners trying to remove themselves via higher education from the cycle of recidivism that is such a pervasive feature of punitive cultures the world over, that sees prisoners once having served their sentence, with few other options in life, returning to a life of crime outside. Too often though, in the interests of maintaining security, what limited movement is available to prisoners inside is often curtailed. This often impedes access to educational services, many of them on-line. This discourages student prisoners from attempts to secure what might be life-altering credentials that could deter them from a life of crime, and many, save the most tenacious, simply give up, in sheer frustration.

Dan Cohen’s paper focus on the rapid growth of charter school policies across the United States at a rapid pace. However, despite this rapid growth, these policies have spread unevenly across the country with important variations in how charter school systems function in each state. Taking a policy mobility approach, and drawing on case studies in Michigan and Oregon, Cohen argues that mobile education policies are best conceptualized as made up of both mobile and immobile elements that continually shape and reshape those policies. Cohen argues that the aim of the paper is not to undermine broader critiques of school choice, but rather to extend our understanding of how policies travel and how the nature of their movement shapes how they are implemented in different sites. Cohen concludes that focusing on the policy mobility of charter school policies highlights the ways the policies remake the landscape of public education in some contexts and remain a marginal policy intervention in others.

Marcia Mackenzie’s paper also looks at policy mobility, but looks to connect mobility, affect and policy, explores the importance of affect in the policy implementation process, a process that hitherto has concentrated much of its analytic on policy ‘effects’. Yet as Mackenzie’s paper convincingly demonstrates that policy makers are forever involved in mobilizing support for policy change and instrumentation through the careful orchestration of ‘affective politics’. These typically focuses on ‘precarity’ as a rhetorical weapon, one that consistently draws attention to crises afflicting the schooling system, many of them of a low order, and that mobilizes policy implementation as a cogent reform measure that will rid the system of its problems. Mackenzie understands the policy process as one involving moving policy ideas into place, marshalling them together in such a way that they resonate persuasively with their receptors, appeal to their sense of appropriateness such that they are taken up rather than rejected. Through an assumption that policy processes are by their very nature rational and purely technical, the role of affect, which would have been as averse to this nature, in the policy process has hitherto been neglected, something her article, through its identification of the affective underwriting of policy, redresses.

Though they do not use the term, Colin Symes and Christopher Drew’s paper is an exploration of the way higher education institution exploit advertising ‘affect’ to marshal attention for their institution, especially that of students looking for a university or college to undertake undergraduate or postgraduate study. The context for what they call a ‘textual ethnography’ are spaces of mobility such as railway stations and trains in Sydney, where higher education institutions, recognizing that large numbers of potential students are channelled through transit spaces each day, have taken to advertising their educational virtues, of which their instrumentalism is the principle. For a dominant leitmotif of this advertising, argue Symes and Drew, is that education is invariably represented as a journey, that higher education can take students places, can set them on a rewarding career path.¹

A notable feature of the papers that contribute to this issue is their willingness to adopt non-mainstream methodologies, such as textual ethnography (e.g. Symes and Drew) and auto-ethnography (e.g., Metcalfe). This is also apparent in Kalervo Gulson, Steven Lewis, Bob Lingard, Chris Lubienski, Keita Takayama and Taylor Webb’s paper, which rather than applying such methodologies explores new methodologies associated with the emerging field of ‘policy mobilities’ that can research the networked and relational, or ‘topological’, nature of globalised education policy, which cuts across the new spaces of policy-making and new modes of global educational governance. The paper examines the methodological issues pertaining to the study of the movement of policy, specifically contemporary methodological thinking around social network analysis and the ethnographic notion of ‘following the policy’. The paper discusses the limitations of these approaches to adequately address presence in policy network analysis, and the problem of representing speed and intensity of policy mobility, even while these attempt to solve the problem of relationality and territoriality.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. It is telling about the state of higher education in Australia and the buying power of its degrees that precisely the same trope is used in its advertisements by New South Wales State Transit to recruit bus drivers and to sell its Opal Card to children: that both will take them places!