Discrepant knowledge and interAsian mobilities: unlikely movements, uncertain futures

From elite to discrepant knowledge mobilities

Over the last two decades, Asian nations have embarked on ambitious political projects that seek to reconfigure education, research and knowledge as critical drivers of competitiveness, productivity and economic growth (Daniels, Ho, & Hutton, 2012; Ong, 2006). Heralded as the pathway to global emergence, these knowledge projects hinge on the cultivation and circulation of people, the transfer of skills and knowledge and the generation of new inter-Asian connections that cut across traditional hierarchies of nations, cities and institutions (Collins & Ho, 2014). These aspirations speak to the multiplex challenges of interconnected Asian modernities: demographic growth in some places and a desire for renewal in others (Lukacs, 2015); the human capital demands of service and technology-centered economies in an era of growing trade (Yeoh & Huang, 2011); the impact of regional mobility and ethnic diversity on national identities (Lai, Collins, & Yeoh, 2013); the place of meritocracy, privilege and inequality in the making of knowledge economies (Koh, 2014); and the social and ecological consequences of economic growth.

Central in both governmental imaginings and scholarly accounts of knowledge mobilities has been a focus on the role of elite subjects and spaces in the production and circulation of knowledge forms and practices (Williams & Baláž, 2014). In the Asian region, for example, the focus on knowledge economies by governments has placed a particular premium on transforming national universities into global centres of higher education (Mok, 2015). As scholars have observed, however, this process has often involved a concentration of resources on already elite institutions who are best placed to achieve world-class status as measured in rankings and on encouraging their students to become more globally oriented (Collins & Park, 2016). Similarly, international students have become sought after not only as participants in these globalising higher education spaces but also as future talent who can support knowledge-intensive economic development (Shin & Choi, 2015). More widely, too, scholars have observed the remaking of urban spaces in Asia as post-industrial zones, desirable destinations for knowledge migrants and regional hubs for education, research and technology (Roy & Ong, 2011).

The alignment of scholarly attention with these privileged sites of policy making and knowledge production has the effect of obscuring the variety of institutions and movements that are involved in knowledge circulation in Asia and elsewhere. We observe in this special issue of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education a range of other population mobilities that are associated with knowledge and different sorts of institutional formations that speak to similar discourses of circulation and advancement, but also exceed these exactly because they are neither elite nor neatly fit the fine-tuned visions of governments. The articles collected in this special issue were first developed and presented at a workshop on ‘Knowledge Mobilities and the Prospects for InterAsian Urbanisation’ held within the InterAsian Connections V conference held in Seoul in April 2016. Whilst our aim in that workshop was a broad engagement with emergent forms of knowledge mobilities in Asian cities, what became clear through dialogue was the significance of hitherto under-researched patterns and their significance for how scholars address the relationship between knowledge and mobility in Asia and beyond. These alternative knowledge mobilities include growing numbers of young people becoming educated and mobile in developing contexts in Asia (Kanagasabai, 2018), international students moving horizontally between similarily positioned educational systems (Yang, 2018), new kinds of educators who becoming part of international education circuits (Hickey, 2018), to marginalised migrants who seek to transform themselves into more desirable subjects (Feakins & Zemnukhova, 2018; Nugroho, Cho, & Collins, 2018) and institutions grappling with multiple possibilities for becoming global (Ortiga, 2018; Phan, 2018). These alternative or less recognised knowledge mobilities draw attention to the opening up of knowledge production, to the ways in which individuals and organisations might negotiate the manifestly uneven contours of social and economic development, migration regimes and normative policy settings. They speak to the play of the possible in the politics of current configurations of knowledge and movement.

We propose that these alternative knowledge mobilities can be best explored through a conceptual focus on ‘discrepancy’. To speak of ‘discrepant’ knowledge and mobilities is to recognise that the production of knowledge regularly involves shaping how we know the world and how we might act within it. Edward Said (1993) used the notion of ‘discrepant experiences’ to highlight the manner in which common knowledge not only contrasts with but also works through those knowledge forms that are seen as more ‘discrepant’, that sit outside but also addressed elite or privileged concerns. Focusing in particular on the literature of the colonised, Said (1993) emphasised the importance of seeing how discrepant experiences interacted with wider discourses and human subjectivities, recognising that –

each [had] its particular agenda and pace of development, its own internal formations, internal coherence and system of external relationships, all of them co-existing and interacting with others. (p. 36)

Distinct and discrepant forms of knowledge may well seem at odds with dominant or privileged forms, such as Euro-American traditions of academic knowledge production or the elite spaces of knowledge mobilities, but they also reflect potential convergences and transformations (Jazeel & McFarlane, 2007).

We specifically choose the term ‘discrepant’ rather than subaltern or alternative knowledge mobilities because of the way that the former highlights the production of difference in relation to dominant forms, rather than outside of or in opposition to these forms (Mignolo, 2000). Our reading both builds on but also expands beyond Said’s original formulation to conceive of the wide variety of ways in which knowledge and mobility work in relation to each other. Set in these terms, drawing attention to discrepant experience involves looking across diverse social spectrums, not only paying attention to elite formations but also incorporating experiences that may appear to sit outside of these processes (Mattingly, 2013). The papers gathered here, for example, all take a bottom up approach to knowledge mobilities with detailed ethnographically grounded accounts of people on the move, their aspirations and undertakings and the different actors and institutions involved in facilitating, shaping and constraining such movements. These readings provide an important and largely unrecognised alternative to the master narratives of knowledge economies and mobilities that pervade scholarly and policy accounts of contemporary education and migration alike.

Addressing the discrepant in this way is about more than empirical gap filling however. Rather, there is also a need to build on these experiences and the insights that can be gained to read against the grain of hegemonic practices (Pannian, 2016), such as the worlding practices of contemporary knowledge economies that privilege the making of elite centred cities, universities and migrations (Roy & Ong, 2011). There is a need to recognise that as a wider range of universities seek to become global, the forms of globality and the very means of achieving global recognition will vary in ways that demand new conceptualisations. Phan’s (2016) account of transnational higher education in Asia gives us some sense of this where she blends notions of desire for Western education with a critical reading of mediocrity in the ways in which repetition occurs in the circulation of higher education forms globally. There is, in this respect, a need to ‘mark dislocations and alterities carefully to avoid conflating processes that are discrepant’ (John, 1996, p. 16) for it is in such differences that dominant forms become visible and alternative possibilities might be revealed. Discrepant knowledge mobilities as they are examined in this special issue index dominant forms but also express different meanings for knowledge and mobility, rely on particular structures or arrangements and speak to opportunities for transformations in lives and identities that are precluded in hegemonic knowledge economies.

A third key component of our focus on discrepancy is to provide a basis to explore the unintended effects of knowledge mobilities. In a considerable body of literature on knowledge mobilities broadly, and in the Asian region specifically, the focus has remained on hegemonic or mainstream accounts such as discussions on state and institutional approaches to the globalisation of higher education (Marginson, 2011; Mok, 2015; Yang, 2003). While these are clearly important there is also a risk that extant differences are subsumed in a way that contributes to the construction of relatively narrow conceptions of what it means to be ‘global’, ‘cosmopolitan’, ‘talented’ or ‘skilled’, privileging elite versions while also serving as a foundation for the perpetuation of Eurocentric knowledge production. How, for example, do we account for the lives of non-elite students aspiring to cosmopolitanism and cultural capital (Cheng, 2018) not just while they are studying but also in their after-study lives (Collins, Ho, Ishikawa, & Ma, 2017)? What are the effects of universities in the periphery pursuing global agendas (Phan, 2016)? And what do these emerging discrepant forms mean for dominant elite-focused modes of policy making?

These questions are particularly apposite in the context of contemporary Asia where recent transformations are opening up new possibilities for connections and mobilities within and beyond the region: demographic variations in the region see some nations encountering a booming youth population while others are struggling for demographic renewal (Lukacs, 2015); culture is circulating much more widely within the region with new centres emerging and consumerism taking on both shared and divergent forms (Wee, 2016); and while development trajectories of Asian nations vary considerably, there is much circulation of models of development through the region and efforts to emulate seemingly successful cases (Lim, 2015). Knowledge mobilities run through all of these transformations but as the papers in this special issue make clear their manifestations are not even but rather take on discrepant forms as well as dominant modes, working from the margins to alter expectations about movement, learning and future possibility. In what follows we address three key components of discrepant knowledge mobilities as they emerge in the papers that form this special issue: unlikely or marginal mobilities, intersections of privilege and precarity and infrastructures of knowledge mobilities.

Unlikely or marginal mobilities

The papers collected in this special issue document and develop insights from manifestations of marginal or unlikely movements associated with knowledge acquisition. As several authors in this issue note (especially Kanagasabai, 2018; Nugroho et al., 2018; Ortiga, 2018; Phan, 2018; Yang, 2018) the participation of non-elite persons in mobility or migration for knowledge acquisition is fundamentally connected to the capacity to imagine and construct desirable futures. This is a theme that has significant resonance with research on international student mobilities in particular where scholars have long recognised that studying abroad is associated with the accumulation of social and cultural capital (Brooks & Waters 2011), the development of cosmopolitan or globally-oriented identities (Kim, 2013) and the pleasure associated with travel and experiencing other places (Beech, 2014). The focus within such research has been very much on student mobility as an expression of socio-economic advantage, a pattern that reflects a view ‘that internationally mobile students are invariably privileged’ (Waters, 2012, p. 128). For privileged populations, mobility is connected to self-investment, ambition and the reproduction of class positions and inequalities. Sellar and Gale (2011, p. 118) have, for example, highlighted the complex relationship between mobility and advantage, citing Elliott and Urry’s (2010, p. 10) observation that ‘today’s multiple mobilities generates new kinds of power for realising ambition and interests (but also) new possibilities and risks’.

By focussing on discrepant mobilities, our work takes a different focus from these studies by addressing variations in the nature of educational mobility, the emergent character of individual and familial aspirations and the uncertainties involved in mobility. Unlike elite mobility, forms of discrepant mobility are often undertaken in conditions of uncertainty and relative deprivation, where education overlaps with contract labour and where families go into substantial debt in order to send the student abroad. Mobility is therefore undertaken as an escape from the inhibiting circumstances that condition individual and family possibilities for life enhancement at home. In this regard, there is an affiliation between discrepant and elite forms of mobility, not least in the ways in which the former indexes the latter as evidence for the efficacy of certain actions – study abroad, even by students excluded from elite circuits, speaks to the power of knowledge and mobility as mechanisms for achieving socio-economic advancement. Unsurprisingly, then, opportunities for such movements also emerge as part of outreach efforts by lower tiered universities located away from the large metropolises or those seeking to target new populations. These universities represent opportunities to a layer of unlikely students that are often invisible to institutions dominating the landscape of globalising higher education but in doing so they also adopt and redeploy the logics of those dominant forms.

In this context, the nature of the student’s aspirations to become mobile, to acquire knowledge and to take on new subjectivities, are an important focus exactly because they push against the grain of the master narratives of knowledge economies that prioritise the prospects of ‘the best and brightest’. This mobility relates, then, to both the ‘capacity to aspire’ (Appadurai, 2013) as well as the manner in which institutions seek to cultivate aspiration amongst people who had not otherwise considered these opportunities. Whereas the reproduction of privilege through elite mobility and education ordinarily carries with it an expectation of completion and success, discrepant mobilities appear much more speculative because they are not based on established paths or patterns of achievement but rather on emergent notions of hope, optimism and possibility that cannot be anchored to more fixed expectations. There is a need then to place greater attention on an understanding of how students aspirations and identities unfold through the mobility and education process – in what circumstances are unlikely education mobilities constituted as desirable? What possibilities do marginal students and their families see in such mobilities? What types of education outcomes can be discerned from such mobilities?

Yang’s (2018) account of Indian students undertaking English-medium medical degrees in provincial China provides an apposite example of discrepant mobilities that articulate with but also differ from elite formations in important ways. He places particular emphasis on the need to examine alternative logics in establishment and facilitation of international student mobility and the manner in which this involves students, their families, institutions and intermediaries. Rather than directed focus on cultural capital accumulation and credentialism, this case study reveals logics of compromise and complicity that are evident when students undertake study opportunities that do not have clear pathways to future career success. In taking this approach Yang (2018) wonders if such endeavours are ‘unproductive, wasteful and even cruel consequences of education widely perceived and embraced as a container of hope’. At the same time, however, his argument also provides scope to question the emphasis on calculative and strategic thinking and action that continues to dominate scholarly understandings of international student mobilities, raising instead questions about uncertainty and desire that must be situated in the realities of socio-economic circumstances.

Another account of uncertainty and aspiration in educational undertakings is presented in Nugroho et al.’s (2018) discussion of Indonesian migrant workers in South Korea who undertake study at the Indonesia Open University’s weekend campuses in Korea. Facing considerable resistence from employers and the risk of studying at an institution that has limited reputation, the individuals in this paper undertake study as part of aspirations for altering socio-economic circumstances and for taking on more desirable identities as students. Nugroho et al. (2018) highlight some of the benefits that participants identified, such as new responsibilities for those studying English to translate factory announcements or the promise of improved career prospects. In the process students also express a more hyphenated identity as ‘worker-students’ that hinges on an effort to increase their position as hitherto low-wage, low-status migrant workers. New student identities are celebrated and reaffirmed on social media, where emotions, aspirations, and hope for the future are being condensed and scripted for an audience. It is in this performance we see how education as a container of hope is being embraced by the student, even where its outcomes remain fundamentally uncertain.

Perhaps the most uncertain of transformations come when the education process is tied to changes in identity and orientation. Kanagasabai (2018) describes the process of affective labour among a community of faculty and students in women’s studies programmes in Tier II cities in Tamil Nadu, India. She focuses in particular on the experiences and situated knowledge of practicitioners as pivotal in constructing opportunities as well as shaping the identities and progressive ideals of its students. This focus on an alternative discipline in alternative urban spaces outside the metropolitan core provides scope to consider how peripherality creates opportunities for those who would otherwise be marginalised in elite and mainstream education and in the process makes it possible for such individuals to imagine more open futures for themselves. Thus this change to the self- identity of students is tied up with their empowerment. The change is all the more remarkable because the students are from small villages, members of tribal communities, often the first in their families to receive university education. Significantly, this circuit of education and its after study movements also adds diversity to the urban and cosmopolitan roots of women’s movement in India.

Phan (2018) addresses another example of non-metropolitan education in her account of globalising higher education in regional Vietnam and the manner in which this takes shape through desires, dreams and fantasies about what is possible through English education. She focuses in particular on the implementation of American-informed English curriculum and the establishment of South-South linkages with countries like the Philippines as part of strategies to globalise the institution. Whilst these interventions mirror some of the techniques undertaken by higher reputation universities they also reveal substantial resource inequalities that manifest in the continued idealisation of the West as a source of educational models. Phan’s account also addresses the narratives of students moving through these spaces and in particular one individual coming from a poor family background in a small town in the Philippines to study in this remote Vietnamese university. Whilst her narrative verifies the structural difficulties faced by peripheral institutions and students, it also points to the possibilities that manifest in such patterns, to imagine different kinds of futures that hinge on the value of mobility in providing encounters with diverse experiences. In such a case, Zipin, Sellar, Brennan, and Gale’s (2015) typology of aspirations is quite useful. Moving away from the home country may in fact create some disassociation with doxic (home country mainstream) types of educational aspirations, along with habituated aspirations. This distance goes some way in allowing for experiments, new forms of friendships and mentorships, creating space for emergent aspirations which are tied to experiences arising from the new situation and the opportunities this brings.

In contrast to these accounts of uncertainties in educational mobility, Ortiga (2018) presents a case of alternative movement that appears to have much more straightforward outcomes because of the manner in which knowledge acquisition is closely tied to employment outcomes. She discusses the emergence of Manila as an unlikely global hub for vocational education that leverages off the Philippines’ established global labour market reputation in sectors like nursing and seafaring as part of the recruitment of local and international students. A key feature of this arrangement is the strong connections between institutions and agents involved in both student recruitment and after study job placements. The effect is a kind of pipeline that adds considerable certainty to study and work outcomes but that also has the effect of positioning graduates as particular kinds of mobile subjects in particular occupations – globally mobile migrant labour rather than the valorised figure of ‘foreign talent’. Like the other examples discussed in this section, then, the arrangements discussed by Ortiga (2018) also provide evidence of an increasingly segmented higher education market within which institutional reputation, study-work transitions and student and graduate identities are becoming differentiated. In this sense, these accounts of unlikely or marginal movements should not be taken as always leading to transformation and empowerment, even if they are often narrated in these terms by institutions. Rather, by drawing individuals into new possibilities for their futures they can also work through hope or optimism that can tie individuals to what are uncertain or relatively constrained futures.

Privilege and precarity

Through the emphasis on discrepancy we also observe that knowledge mobilities can involve contradictory intersections of privilege and precarity. In extant literature, it is privilege that is ordinarily associated with knowledge mobilities and the political projects involved in enabling and shaping knowledge circulations and population flows across Asia and other geographic contexts (Ong, 2006; Williams & Baláž, 2014). Precarity, by contrast, would seem the domain of those excluded from knowledge production and circulation. Yet, we also need to recognise that recent transformations in the organisation of work, the structure of life courses and in the opportunities presented by education often point to precarity as an increasingly widespread characteristic of social and economic life (Neilson & Rossiter, 2008), even for those who are also manifestly privileged (Ettlinger, 2007).

The intersection of privilege and precarity is particularly notable in the shifting contours of educational curriculum in elite schools and universities. While elite education has always involved processes of class reproduction through social and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984) there is also evidence that parental investment in education now also revolves around increased anxiety about the opportunities available to even privileged children. Oh (2018) captures this dilemma in her discussion of ‘escaping obsolesence’ in an international school based in the rapidly developing new city of Songdo in South Korea. Here she traces the growing popularity of private international schools in South Korea to parental and societal anxieties about obsolescence that then become part of the discourses that young people craft for themselves. Private international schools such as the one Oh studies respond to these concerns through the development of skills based programmes that focus principally on inculcating students into a conception of the world and their futures as always at risk, uncertain and filled with precarity. Privilege, in other words, appears to work through the development of skills to deal with a world that educational systems increasingly accept are turbulent and uncertain.

The creative tension between privileged forms and precarious situations also manifests through the participation of seemingly marginal subjects in globalising forms of education. The teaching of English as a global language represents a good example of this tension, where scholars have observed that while English education is a site of massive financial investment in Asia it also involves the migration and employment of people who are often in precarious situations at home (Lan, 2011). Hickey (2018) captures a unique dimension of this through her account of ‘outer circle’ English teachers in Thailand. These teachers, coming from former British and American colonies in Africa and Asia, are at once part of the global English language industry and yet also in a marginalised position with respect to those teachers who come from the Anglophone core. They teach in places like Thailand because of exclusions from major destinations in East Asia and elsewhere that legislate for ‘native speakers’ who are only from inner circle countries. Yet, as Hickey’s paper demonstrates their precarious engagement with English teaching can also serve as a means to advance personal aspirations for travel and development but also how their presence reveals unexpected connections between Thailand and South Asia, the Philippines and Africa. Working from the edges of privileged knowledge mobilities their migration speaks to alternative forms of globalisation that operate in relation to rather than opposing dominant structures such as the global spread of English.

Another dimension of the manner that intersections between privilege and precarity take shape is in the multiple experiences of mobility and knowledge that people moving together have. Kang (2018) takes up this issue through her consideration of the identities and aspirations expressed by both pre-college students and their accompanying mothers who move from South Korea to Singapore for the children’s education. She focuses in particular on subjective experiences of time (temporality), drawing on Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope, in order to explore the discrepant experiences of students and their mothers and the manner in which both are situated in relation to their mobility across transnational contexts. Like many studies of international students (Collins & Shubin, 2017), Kang’s child participants described being oriented around a chronotope of ‘constant becoming’ where the future and global space are invested with new aspirations and possibilities even as these migrations are at least initially directed by parents. By contrast, students’ mothers, who often had successful careers pre-migration, experienced an intensification of traditional mothering in Singapore and expressed feelings of ageing rapidly as they departed from the temporal norms of modern Korean life. Rather than a singular experience of time and mobility, then, this account points to the way in which subject positions matter for even seemingly privileged migratory patterns and how the investment in children’s futures can be seen as detrimental to personal wellbeing.

The career possibilities of alternative knowledge mobilities are clearly an important concern for people on the move as well as scholars seeking to understand what sorts of processes of becoming and transformation are possible. To what extent can mobile people capitalise on knowledge mobilities that are outside the western and Anglophone-centered educational structures? What different forms do these take? Feakins and Zemnukhova’s (2018) paper explores these concerns through a focus on the interconnections that criss-cross Central Asia in the education of IT specialists and their future work mobilities into Russia. Focusing on Kazakhstan the authors show how educational and career opportunities are generated at the intersection of the geopolitical histories of the region in the Soviet and post-Soviet era, Turkish influence in schooling and the emergence of opportunities in Russian labour markets that are usually closed off to outsiders. Feakins and Zemnukhova’s notion of ‘liminal mobility’ speaks to the as yet weakly determined character of these migrations – the young people they draw attention to are pioneers of new iterations of post-soviet highly-skilled migration that have not yet been established as normalised patterns. Similarly, their own careers remain tenuous, filled with excitement but also subject to constant changes in demand and the emergence of new opportunities elsewhere. In other words, they reveal both a privileged position as a desired worker in the high technology economy while also demanding an adeptness to negotiate very rapidly changing knowledge landscapes.

Infrastructures of knowledge mobilities

The third theme that emerges in examing discrepant knowledge mobilities is the significance of infrastructures, the meso-level manifestation of actors, networks and institutions that are critical to the facilitation and channelling of migration. This dimension differs from the other two in its emphasis not on movement and knowledge per se but rather their enablement by less mobile people and things, what mobilities scholars would describe as ‘moorings’ (Hannam, Sheller, & Urry, 2006). Infrastructures appear across the papers in the special issue, drawing attention to the ‘physical and organisational architectures’ (Lin, Lindquist, Xiang, & Yeoh, 2017, p. 168) that play an important role in generating aspirations for mobility, coordinating movements and giving meaning to migration. As Xiang and Lindquist (2014) suggest, the infrastructures of migration and other forms of mobility are diverse, spanning commercial, regulatory, social, humanitarian and technological dimensions. Drawing attention to the role of different infrastructures in migration makes it possible to see how different forms of movement take shape through the reconfiguration of relations between places, which in the case of this special issue relate primarily to the making of interconnected Asian modernities cut through with different inclusions and exclusions.

Higher education is a particularly rich area to explore the significance of infrastructural work in enabling and channelling mobility and giving meaning to the differences that emerge through movement. In the Asian context, for example, we only need to look at the ways in which top universities in this region have responded to a new and evolving environment of globalising higher education (Ho, 2014). The flagship universities of Asia have used the power of their growing reputation in league tables to build relationships between governments, universities and researchers which, along with alumni networks and direct marketing to prospective students, have ensured a regular flow of students to their campuses (Ge & Ho, 2018). New investments facilitate the expansions of campus activities and make it possible to reach out to new students who might be attracted to the world class university; the circulation of curriculum and accreditation standards give meaning to and certify the quality of different degrees; and university consortium serve to intensify connections between particular institutions that see themselves as having shared interest and reputational status (Mok, 2015).

This special issue goes beyond the studies which look at the multiple ways in which privilege is reproduced via higher education by examining a layer of infrastructure which enables the movement of unlikely educational migrants. At the lower ends of the higher education spectrum, it has been less clear how the infrastructures of knowledge mobilities operate to attract international students. What strategies and incentives are there and how do these work against the absence of reputation or worse, the negative portrayal of these universities by media and other academics? In each of the papers that address study at universities, Ortiga, Yang, Phan, Kanagasabai and Nugroho et al, there is recognition that the institutions students study at do not have the kinds of reputations necessary to secure successful global careers usually associated with student mobility. They are located in smaller, more remote places, and their low tier status keeps them out of the orbit of potential student markets. Rather than these reputational infrastructures, then, the authors point to a range of other actors and networks that in many cases actually introduce students to institutions that they otherwise would not be aware of. This includes the formal work of eduation brokers, such as those documented by Yang (2018), who play a significant role in building trust with students and contributing to the compromises involved for Indian students undertaking English-medium medical education in China. Such brokers can play multiple roles in the activation and directionality of mobility. They can be former students themselves (as in Yang’s case) as well as playing a role in both recruitment for study and deployment for post-study work (as Ortiga demonstrates), drawing tighter linkages between the expectations and outcomes of education and migration.

Beyond the role of agents, the elements in the infrastructure of knowledge mobilities can be less obvious but they are no less significant in supporting and directing flows. Feakins and Zemnukhova (2018), for example, point to the legacy of a Soviet infrastructure and Turkish linked schooling as pivotal foundations for the emergent post-Soviet tech migration that they observe. In this instance, high quality secondary schools in the former Soviet states not only prepare students in science and language skills but also the geographical imaginary that orientates them to the key cities of Russia for a cosmopolitan life, a thriving IT community and a variety of interesting projects and teams which enable learning as well as sociability. So too we can point to the ongoing salience of colonial educational influence in several of the papers. The ‘outer circle’ teachers discussed in Hickey’s paper for example are linked into possibilities for becoming mobile English educators as a result of the role of English in the former British and American colonies that they come from. So too the Philippines (Ortiga, 2018) and Singapore’s (Kang, 2018) emergence as educational destinations for different kinds of students hinges on the infrastructural support and symbolic value of education systems that have a colonial heritage, particularly in terms of the use of English. Lastly, Oh’s (2018) paper speaks to a more emergent set of infrastructures in new urban developments such as those taking shape in Songdo, where parental aspirations for their children to become globally oriented need to be situated in relation to boosterist urban policy that seeks to establish connections into global knowledge and economic flows.

In other instances, infrastructure manifests in more informal networks (often returned alumni of these universities) at home and abroad for opportunities to study and for their transition to work. The problem of the portability of qualifications make these informal networks all the more necessary (see for example Collins et al., 2017). Earlier returnees develop business opportunities where job opportunities are meagre and social media facilitated communications provide a channel for the learning about such opportunities among migrants (see Nugroho et al., 2018). Hickey’s (2018) paper illustrates two important facets of this infrastructure. In low regulatory countries and away from the large metropolises, a grey zone exists that allows for both migrants and their would be employers to exploit employment loopholes in the hiring of outer circle (non-white teachers from the Global South) English teachers. Thus, Hickey’s paper shows a match in the relationship between the periphery and the marginal graduate, both are at a disadvantage vis-à-vis other English education centres and teachers. The entry of outer circle teachers is mediated by informal networks of friends and countrymen who point to locations and opportunities that are themselves unlikely to attract inner circle teachers. As job prospects in Global South countries are meagre for new graduates, such work opportunities create new experiences and the excitement of travel among young graduates, but can also serve as the building of work experience and professional capital that open up potential mobility futures.

Conclusions and future directions

The papers in this special issue speak to the importance of opening up extant readings of knowledge mobilities and disentangling them from their connection with elite political projects. Through the diverse case studies presented here, the authors reveal new or at least under-researched participants in knowledge mobilities, the emergence of alternative educational arrangements and the infrastructures or foundations that support the movement of people. In doing so, the papers all echo the imperative of examining discrepancy – the ways in which experiences that appear to be ‘ideologically and culturally closed to each other’ (Said, 1993, p. 37) also co-exist and interact with others in a way that reveals the power of differentiation. In the cases presented here, the emphasis has been particularly on the ways in which emergent knowledge mobilities take shape in relation to master narratives of the knowledge economy and the values associated with elite mobilities. The authors, however, have also clearly shown that there is more than mimcry occurring here. Unlikely or marginal movements are not only the extension of global norms into new spaces, but rather the emergence of these new connections between people and places also have their own functions and internal coherence and provide scope to develop insights that have wider resonance to scholarly understandings of the relationship between knowledge and mobility. Accordingly, we identify three areas of significance that emerge from this special issue that can guide future research into knowledge mobilities.

First, we argue that scholars need to pay much greater attention to the differentiated outcomes that manifest in knowledge mobilities. Research on elite knowledge mobilities have often taken outcomes for granted, by focusing on the narratives of international students at elite institutions for example and then presuming that they are on a linear path to reproducing socio-economic advantage. The scope of the papers here has also largely remained on instances of learning or deploying knowledge while being mobile, but the very marginal and unlikely character of many mobilities documented here means that we cannot take for granted what happens as a result. What kinds of transitions will take place here for migrant workers who become students, for vocational international students, for those studying in peripheral institutions? Their narratives and those of the institutions they attend often speak to a promise of transformation, but there is great uncertainty about what follows and a need for scholars exploring the margins of knowledge mobility to focus more readily on what occurs after study. Even for knowledge mobilities that seem more imbued with privilege it is clear that scholars need to grapple more directly with the portability of knowledge and the manner that students, migrants and their families negotiate conditions of uncertainty.

Second, the papers presented here suggest the need to explore the importance of surviving and thriving in a world that is constantly changing, even for the elite but certainly for those who are in more marginal positions. Knowledge mobilities have an important role to play here and in many cases detailed in this special issue involve attempts by individuals to change their situation, to improve livelihoods for themselves or their families. One reading of these mobilities might be to suggest that they are a kind of ‘anticipatory politics’ (Simone, 2010) that involves taking opportunities as they emerge and in the process constructing new kinds of futures. Read in this way, the claims of future transformation and opportunity that occur in all of these papers might be seen as the key outcome of mobility, allowing individuals to imagine better futures. The question remains however, to what extent are these aspirational narratives empowering? How are these narratives influenced by wider discourses about the value of mobility that make certain undertakings desirable and sensible? Can the hope and future orientation articulated here also constitute a kind of ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2011) that encourages emotional and financial investment in mobilities that constrain as much as open up futures? We provide no final answers to these questions but the accounts presented here demonstrate the need for scholars to read against the grain of celebratory discourses associated with knowledge and mobility and their implications for people’s futures.

Lastly, the insights presented in this special issue demonstrate the need to pay more attention to the emergence of mobility patterns and arrangements that do not align with national and institutional imaginaries about the value and proper order of knowledge mobilities. There is certainly some evidence that the cases discussed here replicate features commonly associated with elite mobilities. They also involve people stepping outside of these norms however, becoming a student when one is expected to be a worker, pursuing education in unknown places, compromising on quality, working in grey zones in order to be included in the benefits of mobility, embracing anxiety to operate in a precarious future. Flexible infrastructures that extend well beyond the formal spaces of institutions and national policy making are clearly central to the emergence of these patterns. Rather than movement through fixed and formal hierarchies, then, we have seen that knowledge mobilities can also involve roundabout routes, responses to opportunities that emerge and a kind of hopefulness that eschews the rationalism that pervades policy and institutional imaginaries. For scholars, this suggests that there is also a need for research to look beyond only accounting for or critiquing the master narratives of the knowledge economy and its valorised figures of the ‘global university’ and ‘foreign talent’. Instead, we call for more research on the diverse character of contemporary knowledge mobilities, their necessarily discrepant experiences and outcomes and their implications for interconnected modernities in Asia and beyond.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the 2016 Seoul InterAsian Connections V for hosting our panel of presenters. The papers in this special issue have also benefited from the input of anonymous referees and we have been ably supported by Dawn Butler in taking the finalised papers through to production. Lastly, thanks to the authors in this special issue, for their intellectual rigour and generosity and for extending our insights into new forms of knowledge mobilities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.