Shifting borders and sinking ships: What (and who) is transnationalism “good” for?

Movement is a central characteristic of the contemporary world. The movements of people across geographies were central to many of the debates that stirred political angst during the notorious year of 2016. From the Syrian refugee crisis and the thousands of migrants crossing the Mediterranean into Europe aboard sinking rafts, to Donald Trump's infamous wall rhetoric and the Brexit referendum, both the perceived threat and the fact of human movement have been at the forefront of world news. Yet it was not just the movement of people that caused a stir. In the United States, the Standing Rock protests successfully redirected the movement of oil across the land, representing one of the most significant victories for Indigenous peoples against global capital. Trade agreements were at the centre of political campaigns across the globe, and there were both excitement and dread about the prospects of corporations moving jobs to and from nation-states. The movement of images and information are also increasingly ubiquitous, as nations use the Internet to meddle in the political processes of other nations and as the phenomenon of “fake news” becomes, ironically, news itself.

The theme and structure of this special issue emerged in response to such recent events that cast migration into a public spotlight of news cycles and diplomacy, raising the question of transnationalism to pressing importance across the political–personal spectrum. But what (and whom) is transnationalism good for? It may be that the world is more interconnected by the movement of people, materials, and ideas today than it was yesterday, but what is less clear, and perhaps always changing, is what counts as movement, who benefits (and how) from such movements, and what are the conditions that, on the one hand, enable such movements, and on the other, emerge from movement itself. More to the point of this special issue, the educational possibilities that these instances of transnational movement produce are also far from decided.

Contributors in this special issue stake a position in response to the question: “What is the curriculum of global/transnational migration?” In our call, we noted that migration is experienced differently by different people. Some people cross borders willingly, pursuing the desire for opportunities and experiences, for whom distance seemingly exists “solely in order to be cancelled” (Bauman, 2000, p. 77). Some are compelled to flee situations of oppression and conflict, yet increasingly exercise agency over their own mobility through the use of global communication networks and heightened awareness of international and transnational conditions. We invited the authors to consider the following, among other questions: is the current experience of global/transnational mobility and/or migration really a new phenomenon, or is it an extension of existing processes and dynamics (i.e. colonialism, capitalism, imperialism)? What does global/transnational mobility imply for schools and other educational institutions and processes as spatially located entities? What approaches to curriculum are needed in the constantly shifting context of global movement? How are the “global” and “local” re-imagined through the experiences of mobility and migration? Noting that movement and migration are experienced by individuals, communities, and institutions in varied and complicated ways, the authors in this issue explore some of the multifaceted implications of movement for curriculum, teaching and learning, teacher education, cultural practice, and educational research and policy.

The twelve articles in this issue take up a wide range of positions, but share underlying themes. In some cases, the authors are tentative in “responding” to recent events, looking historically to suggest that perhaps we have been here before, even if the contemporary scale seems unprecedented (see, for instance, Dryden-Peterson, in this issue). What does emerge clearly from the articles is that educational projects do not only inhabit nationally bound spaces negotiated primarily under the eye of the state or between states (i.e. internationally), but are increasingly experienced transnationally. In some ways, the articles in this issue show the interplay between the national, the international, and the transnational; while the international involves interactions, treaties, travels, and exchanges of goods between national governments, the transnational denotes sustained linkages (e.g. cultural and political ties), relationships (e.g. with family members), and practices (e.g. religious activities) of non-state actors across national borders.

The articles illustrate how the collective attributes of these linkages, relationships, and practices and their wider implications are not simply the result of the sum of their parts. Rather, transnationalism represents an emerging social morphology that is increasingly shaped by vast networks that have physical and virtual dimensions, as information, capital, ideas, and people move with increasing fluidity across space and time (Vertovec, 2009). Transnational practices are not undertaken only by those who move from one place to another. The activities and identities of people who do not move are influenced by those who move. For example, when a singer goes to a foreign country to perform for a diasporic audience, the audience as a whole may connect to their or their parents’ homeland (Gowricharn, 2009, cited in Kelly, 2015, see also Ibrahim in this issue). Identities, cultural practices, and social relationships are thus negotiated alongside the movements of people, ideas, and goods across national borders.

As we reflect on the content of the articles in this special issue, we return to the question of who is transnationalism good for? Is transnationalism good for people who, whether individually or collectively, make key choices that influence the course of their migratory path, but who are also impacted by effects of diplomacy, capital, and conflicts outside of their control? Is transnationalism good for nation-states, as they negotiate formalized control of movement over borders and imperial interests with varying degrees of success? And is transnationalism good for “culture” as it proliferates within movements that are felt across geographies, yet also risks suppression and appropriation by powerful global interests? Although the answers to these questions are far from clear, it is in posing the question of “goodness” that we engage with the articles in this issue to discuss what might be at stake.

Is Transnationalism Good for People?

The first set of articles examines how transnationalism serves to facilitate individuals’ and groups’ movement in pursuit of a range of aims: for security and peace, for opportunities to fill personal and economic potential, and for ideological freedom. These trajectories, however, are nonlinear and are fraught with unknown circumstances, hurdles, and contingencies. The four essays in this section reflect on approaches and interventions that education takes to either support or impede the aims of those who experience transnational migration.

Sarah Dryden-Peterson opens this special issue with a portrait of the experience of a teacher named Bauma, a refugee in Uganda, in her article “Refugee Education: Education for an Unknowable Future.” Through the experience of Bauma and other refugee educators, Dryden-Peterson takes account of the fact that conflict and displacement are increasingly protracted over the long term. As returning home to Congo became an increasingly distant and untenable goal, Bauma adjusted to a protracted state of exile by working to raise a corps of teachers and create a school that accepts refugee children when Ugandan schools turn them away. Bauma uses the “promise” of education's possibilities to mend the disjunctures of the refugees’ experience as “the light at the end of a tunnel” (p. 16). At the same time, he is compelled to consider that the aim of education cannot be clearly known when the future is uncertain. The students’ mobility, access to social services, and ability to protect and exercise their rights are tied to, and restricted by, their residence in a refugee camp and their legal status as refugees, limiting their future possibilities. Dryden-Peterson suggests that it is often the task of refugee teachers and schools to take on the twofold responsibility of ensuring their students “continue building their present lives,” while at the same time “preparing for their as yet unknowable futures” (p. 20). For these teachers, education that is “good” for refugee children must embrace a view of the future that is not premised on a quick exit out of the refugee experience, but that instead deals with local circumstances with a long view of what is possible.

The question of curricular approaches that address the constrained agency of newcomer refugee and immigrant students is further taken up by Monisha Bajaj and Lesley Bartlett. In their article titled “Critical Transnational Curriculum for Immigrant and Refugee Students,” they ask how educators might conceptualize transnationalism and holistic understanding of youth as learners, migrants, workers, and social agents to offer recommendations for curriculum approaches that address their needs. Drawing from studies carried out in three schools in the United States, they critique “global citizenship education” as a way of conceptualizing human webs of interdependency. Rather than fostering a more equitable view of transnational relationships and dynamics, their research suggests that some forms of global citizenship education instead privilege and reinforce a Western conception of the formalized relationships between the individual and the state, and often fail to take forced migration into account.

Furthermore, Bajaj and Bartlett conclude from their studies that many United States’ high schools have little support for immigrant populations, and are instead normed towards students who are characteristically white, middle-class, native English-speaking, college bound, and non-working – a reality often not in line with newcomers. Thus, the authors propose a framework of “critical transnational curriculum” that proposes four components of a culturally and socio-politically relevant pedagogy for immigrant and refugee youth. The first tenet advocates for seeing diversity as a resource for critical thinking by learning from other students’ personal experiences. The second calls for engaging in translanguaging, which respects students’ linguistic and cultural repertoires through such strategies as using “peer translators” in classrooms, allowing students to express themselves in their own languages for major assignments, and offering courses that are taught in multiple languages. The third tenet suggests promoting civic engagement as curriculum, sharing examples in which students learn about political processes and social issues through actions that contribute directly towards positive local changes. The fourth tenet takes on the task of cultivating multidirectional aspirations, noting, as Dryden-Peterson also does, that curriculum should aim for more than acculturation and integration as its goal because the future paths of mobility are often unpredictable and unknown. Bajaj and Bartlett's approach to critical transnational curriculum thus sees transnational experiences as an opportunity for migrant communities rather than a liability.

Taking an international comparative approach, Diego Nieto and Kathy Bickmore further critique prevalent approaches to global citizenship education, suggesting that they can impair individual agency when identity positions become reified without an equivalent analysis of structural inequalities. Their analysis shows how young people take up migration and make meaning of the circumstances that lead people to move, showing the multilayered complexity of the question, is migration “good” for people? In “Migration ‘in’ and ‘out’: Canadian and Mexican Youth Making Sense of Globalization Issues,” Nieto and Bickmore present their observations of classroom experiences and focus groups with students from Canada and Mexico. They examine migration as a manifestation of globalization, looking closely at how youth endeavour to make sense of these experiences. Perhaps surprisingly, even when students had first-hand experience with territorial or transnational migration, they struggled to identify larger cultural forces propelling their movement, instead attributing their experiences with migration to isolated personal incidents. Likewise, these students critiqued anti-immigration attitudes and demonstrations of intolerance as individual level rather than structural problems.

Because the image of “global citizenship” is largely interpreted through a lens of Northern/Western domination, Nieto and Bickmore note that marginalized students can come to characterize themselves as “bad” citizens, reproducing global structural inequalities in their perceptions of localized experiences, and that “by separating localized cultural explanations of (globalized) social conflicts from their transnational structural connections, the hegemonic narratives (affirmed by citizenship curricula) mask inequitable global relations” (p. 47). The authors suggest that curricula should be transformed to better reflect the dynamics and complexities of global conflict. This is crucial if educational projects are to challenge problematic notions of what global citizenship is purported to represent for people in the context of transnationalism.

Language, for instance, is one aspect of social context in which inequalities are culturally reproduced, which is key for how transnational dynamics shape migrant experience. Many migrants speak multiple languages, yet they often need to learn a new language to access social, cultural, and economic opportunities. In her essay “Theorizing the Spatial Dimensions and Pedagogical Implications of Transnationalism,” Doris Warriner delves into the linguistic dimensions of global movement and discusses how learning additional languages situates individuals in spaces and timescales, assigning them to roles and practices in processes of social identification. She argues that language learning constitutes a critical aspect of transnational migrants’ lived experiences and, as such, she argues that language needs to be reconceptualized in line with the new social realities afforded by globalization and transnationalism. Such a reconceptualization, Warriner argues, would ask educators to take an intentional approach to pedagogy that attempts to connect the inside and outside of the formal classroom, thus taking into consideration the wide-ranging experiences of transnational families and their children. To that end, Warriner suggests expanding the notion of context to include linguistic and spatial dimensions of transnational mobility. She argues that pedagogical practices that are based on such an expansion will promote transnational individuals’ learning, engagement, and advancement.

While focused on the experiences of people and on how individuals navigate global movement and make meaning of transnational experiences, the articles introduced in this section point to both the limits and possibilities that emerge within the context of particular nation-state. They show, directly or indirectly, that despite the crucial importance of transnationalism, nation-states continue to play a central role in shaping global mobility, whether through state policy or in the ways individuals make sense of migration. This leads us to shift the focus of our question to nation-states.

Is Transnationalism Good for Nation-States?

Transnational studies emerged partly as a response to a dominant trend in the social sciences towards methodological nationalism, which often conflates nation, state, and society as synonymous. Methodological nationalism takes for granted the specificity of national experience, assuming it as universal and ignoring particularity. By contrast, a focus on transnationalism brings attention to non-state actors, stretching analytically cross-political borders of nation-states. A large body of work in transnational studies has grown around the notion of “transnationalism from below,” which points to the activities and networks at the grass-root levels and to transmigrants’ agency to support and maintain such activities and networks (Vertovec, 2009).

Due to this focus on non-state actors, transnational studies have often downplayed the role of states in promoting or hindering transnational relationships, activities, and identities. Migration scholars have only recently begun to pay more attention to the roles and responsibilities of states with regards to transnationalism. Chin and Smith (2015) use the term “state transnationalism” to describe the nation-state's roles in and responsibilities for transnational activities and relationships. They write that state transnationalism “occurs when the state initiates, promotes or sustains cross-border movements and connections of people, commodities, information, capital, institutions and culture in the pursuit of its priorities and the perceived good of its citizens, expatriates or immigrants” (p. 83, emphasis original). States, then, play an active role in considering the question of transnationalism as “good” for its own explicit and implicit interests, with varying degrees of success.

The articles that we introduce in this section point, in varying ways, to the notion of state transnationalism. Collectively, these four articles shed light on the intricate relationships between the state powers that influence school curriculum and individual migrants’ agency. Key to understanding this relationship, however, is the underlying processes through which state ideology regulates who is allowed to be considered a citizen in the first place. According to Lisa Patel, in her article titled “The Ink of Citizenship,” the constant policing of the terms of citizenship is itself central to securing the ideological premises of a nation-state founded on settler colonialism, setting the terms for how the state manages transnational mobility. For Patel, the ways in which the conferral of citizenship and its attendant concepts of legality and belonging are negotiated illustrate the close connection between citizenship and migration through the way in which the state exercises its power to discriminate against some migrants while favouring others.

As Patel writes:

While nations and sovereign entities have unique and important differences in their histories of conferring citizenship or membership, most share meandering histories of delineating differential terms for those who have mitigated, absolute, and blocked access to citizenship and the associative rights. (p. 63)

For Patel, citizenship operates not as a binary (either you are a citizen or you are not), but as a dialectic that shifts and turns in order to occlude more pervasive social dynamics of exclusion. Focusing on citizenship as a binary, Patel argues, misses the larger politics at stake in the complex dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that shape migration.

These dynamics of inclusion and exclusion are furthermore always eliding the fact that such conferral occurs and is dependent upon stolen Indigenous land. Focusing on the US context, Patel offers examples of the ways in which the meaning – and granting – of citizenship has always followed a dialectic relationship to conceptions of race and the politics of distribution and property rights. She describes the many ways in which the internal contradictions of citizenship manifest, with a particular focus on Indigenous and Black experience within settler society. Patel shows that the socio-political structures of settler states work “to erase Indigeneity, collapse Blackness into chattel labor, and convert land into own-able property” (p. 65).

Going beyond a binary notion of citizenship as something that individuals either have or do not have, Patel concludes that the study of transnationalism should aim to throw light on the racially stratified nature of citizenship and its relation to global migration. And it is precisely to this that authors Thea Abu El-Haj and Ellen Skilton turn their attention to in the next article, titled “Toward an awareness of the ‘Colonial Present’ in Education: Focusing on Interdependence and Inequity in the Context of Global Migration.” In this article, the authors discuss how the “colonial present” in the United States shapes the curricular experiences of immigrant and refugee students. The authors draw on their respective ethnographic studies, one with Palestinian immigrant and the other with Cambodian refugee youth.

Drawing comparisons from their two studies, they illustrate that migrant youth face similar situations across schools in the United States. Abu El-Haj and Skilton present three key stances that the migrant youth encountered. The first stance aims to erase the colonial legacies of the United States, the second aims to “civilize” the colonized subjects, and the third aims to create an illusion of inclusion. These stances point to the various curricular strategies through which schools assimilate refugee and immigrant students in order to fit within the cultural, social, and economic logics of the nation-state. Abu El-Haj and Skilton argue that by presenting itself as a benevolent multicultural state, the United States actually attempts to obscure its “colonial present.” As an alternative to hegemonic curricular practices, the authors propose a shift of focus from the nation-state to global interdependence, arguing that such a shift is necessary to nurture among students’ civic identities that are stretched both within and across state borders. Such an approach might seem compelling, particularly for an audience of critical educators, such as the readers of this journal. Yet it is not so clear whether it would be “good” for the interests of nation-states like the United States.

Shifting the focus away from the United States, the next essay by Shibao Guo and Srabani Maitra discusses hegemonic practices in relationship of migration, citizenship, and curriculum in the Canadian public school curriculum. In contrast to the “melting pot” metaphor often associated with the US ideological emphasis on cohesion, Canada is often positioned in public discourses as a multicultural state that welcomes a multiplicity of national identities and expressions. Soon after being elected, for example, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau proclaimed that Canada is “the first postnational state” in the world:

There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.… There are shared values — openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice. Those qualities are what make us the first postnational state. (quoted in Lawson, 2015, para. 44)

Contrary to such rhetoric, however, Guo and Maitra argue that the curriculum of Canadian public schools has remained fundamentally nationalist in terms of which values, behaviours, and knowledge it chooses to normalize within the authoritative curricular canon, while only superficially embracing others. “At best,” they argue, “the curricula seek a tokenistic assimilation of cultural plurality while in practice insisting on a Eurocentric, singular, authentic, national culture that is generous enough to include its subordinated ‘Other’” (p. 81).

As an alternative to such hegemonic curriculum, Guo and Maitra propose a transnational and transcultural framework for an ethical and inclusive curriculum. To do this, they draw on new mobilities paradigms that “desedentarize” notions of culture away from the fixed imaginaries of nationhood imposing a rigid identification assigned to place-based boundaries. A transnational optic, in contrast, reconfigures notions of culture, race, and class from being territorially unitary and static. Instead, it embraces a more nuanced conception of transnational migrant identity that is mobile and fluid. In curriculum, a transnational and transcultural framework implies moving beyond a “mere celebration of differences” towards a greater understanding of how migrants remain implicated in unequal power relations. It encourages students to build openness and empathize with others, to move across boundaries and spaces of interaction, and to foster democratic spaces in order to reflect on discrimination and injustice.

The articles mentioned so far in this section point to the interests of nation-states as promoted through school curriculum. States take advantage of existing transnational conditions and try to reap those benefits that strengthen statehood. However, not all states are equal players on the world stage. Despite historical differences due to domination and colonization, there has been a tendency among some transnational scholars:

to treat all nation-states as if they were equal and sovereign actors within a global terrain. [However], such an approach obscures the extension of the power of some states through financial, military, and cultural means into the domain of others. (Glick Schiller, 2005, p. 443)

In his article titled “‘We are here because you were there’: On Curriculum, Empire, and Global Migration,” Roland Sintos Coloma shows how the United States and Canada extend their imperial power to the economic, cultural, and social lives of the diasporic Filipina/o subjects. Coloma employs a postcolonial critique to discuss the making of the Filipina/o diaspora community as a racialized category with precarious economic and social conditions across North America. This observation of racialization and marginalization leads to the author's argument that “if knowledge production is indelibly central to curriculum inquiry, then a critical investigation of racialized minority and diasporic subjects in general and of Filipina/os in particular can shed light on the intersection of curriculum, empire, and global migration” (p. 92). However, Coloma finds that knowledge about the Philippines and Filipina/o transnational communities is noticeably absent in the US and Canadian school curricula. To address this imperial monoculture of knowledge, Coloma calls for working against curricular epistemicide.

All four articles introduced in this section underscore some of the ways in which states reap colonial and nationalistic benefits from the transnational movement of people, ideas, and practices. In this light, the state remains as an important actor in transnational social and political spaces. Yet, there are important differences in the exercise of power at the global level in that not all states are equally able to facilitate transnational dynamics and possibilities, as we see in the case of Canada, the United States, and the Philippines in Coloma's article. The exercise of imperialism in a global order empowers states to exercise geopolitical powers to determine how their citizens, expatriates, and immigrants experience transnational relationships, practices, and networks to differing degrees. It is, therefore, useful for studies of transnationalism and curriculum to consider both state and non-state actors in order to gain insight into who benefits from the curriculum of global mobility.

Is Transnationalism Good for “Culture”?

The last three articles in this special issue turn our attention to cultural proliferation, cultural production, and the movement of symbols. The pull towards universalism in describing experiences that are no longer confined to national boundaries is compelling, as traditional borders dissolve not only between geopolitical entities, but also between symbolic and cultural expressions. Representations of music, language, food, and regalia are often showcased as the property of an emerging global culture that celebrates human diversity, belonging no longer to the particular historical, social, or spiritual practices from whence they came. At best, such celebrations remain superficial when limited to the outer forms of cultural expression and divorced from the land, people, and purpose that they stand for; at worst, they are a chimera to distract from the same transnational mechanisms of extraction and exploitation that undermine the heritage that they profess to celebrate. Who decides which borders are dissolved, what boundaries are crossed, and with or without whose permission?

Awad Ibrahim suggests that border crossing serves an important role in cultural production when it is localized, connecting local politics to the collective power of a boundary-less movement. In “Arab Spring, Favelas, Borders, and the Artistic Transnational Migration: Toward a Curriculum for a Global Hip-Hop Nation,” Ibrahim explores the idea of the Global Hip-Hop Nation (GHHN) as an illustration of collapsing boundaries and pushing borders’ limits as a semiotic, boundary-less, and arts-based nation that has its own “language” and ways of speaking. Here, the migration Ibrahim refers to is not about bodies over geopolitical borders, but about a movement of cultural production that highlights “the transnational similarities between situations of social inequality, crime, drug use, police brutality, and racism” (p. 107). He takes two examples from across the globe – a hip-hop track that helped ignite support for the Arab Spring and the work of cultural producers in the favelas in Brazil – to show what kinds of social, racial, and political movements emerge around hip-hop practices. Ibrahim suggests that despite the fact that the GHHN is global, it grounds itself deeply in the local. Hip-hoppers as cultural critics and curriculum theorists rethink literacy as “ill-literacy” by, for example, questioning the privilege of grammar over creative and semiotic production, while working across languages in politicizing their local issues through a form of transnational cultural proliferation.

Central to the ways in which symbols move across borders are the ways in which people express their feelings through symbolic work, a process that is embedded in complex affective orders; that is, the movement of culture is also the movement of emotions. Former CI editor (and co-editor of this special issue) Anwar Ahmed makes a compelling case for the importance of taking up the study of emotions in curricular inquiries pertaining to migration and refugee education in his article titled “Emotions in the Curriculum of Migrant and Refugee Students.” Situating the flow of emotions in the context of global migration, Anwar Ahmed illustrates the pivotal role that emotions play in the experiences of migrants and refugees, as well as how emotions affect those in the receiving context of migration to “feel,” and thus respond to, the arrival and presence of migrants. Making the argument that emotions have a categorizing function that operates in relationship to cultural processes, Anwar Ahmed discusses some of the ways in which a consideration of emotions might shed a different kind of light on the educational experiences of migrants and refugees, and he considers what these insights might suggest about mobile students’ educational needs.

The third and final article in this section shifts the focus from cultural production and emotions to cosmopolitanism as a way to frame a global perspective and a progressive educational approach to transnationalism. Many curriculum scholars who take up the kinds of issues that occupy the articles in this special issue of CI draw from cosmopolitanism to provide a response and as a way to imagine a transnational ethic that might address the deleterious effects of power relations. Perhaps one of the most well-worn concepts for thinking about transnationalism, cosmopolitanism is not without its critics, and in their article, titled “Global mobility and the possibilities of a cosmopolitan curriculum,” Jason Beech and Fazal Rizvi attempt to address these critiques. They propose a “cosmopolitan global ethic” in education and explore the possibilities of everyday cosmopolitanism for pedagogical practices that may embrace a “cosmopolitan condition.” For Beech and Rizvi, all students (and teachers) in the contemporary globalized world to some extent or another (and under different conditions) live this cosmopolitan condition. In that sense, cosmopolitanism is a concept that is both descriptive and prescriptive. As such, the authors underscore that pedagogical practices should encourage students to develop interpretive frameworks (i.e. cosmopolitan outlooks) to understand the condition of cosmopolitanism in morally productive ways. Taking up a wide range of approaches to and conceptualizations about cosmopolitanism through work of various curriculum scholars, Beech and Rizvi attempt to deal critically with the universalizing trappings of cosmopolitanism. At the same time, they remain hopeful that a global approach might lead to pedagogical practices that create opportunities for a different kind of orientation towards global difference.

The production and proliferation of “culture” in curriculum of transnational migration, then, is messy, emotion-laden, and contested. Its “goodness” is in question not only from the results that are produced, but from what (and whom) is at stake along the way in the dialectic of universality and particularity that often sits in tension with one another, as much is at stake. Sustaining and engendering difference remains crucial in avoiding the repression and further marginalization of those who have less to benefit from the increasing stratification of a global cultural economy – and often, more to lose. Yet, emotion cannot always be localized, as transnational flows of information and ideas intertwine experiences and expressions inextricably, implicating pedagogy and curriculum in new ways.

Is Another Education Possible?

The articles in this special issue on global migration and transnationalism offer a glimpse into the ways in which scholars take up some of the many questions of educational experience and cultural practice. The authors offer their reflections and innovative ideas about curriculum and pedagogy with regards to movement and mobility. They remind us that displacement is never an isolated event, but rather part and parcel of a complex set of social, economic, and cultural operations. Today, most migration scholars agree that there are multiple factors that shape mobility. These factors – finding economic opportunities, seeking human security, or escaping climate disasters – are interconnected in complex ways. The multifaceted patterns of contemporary migration oppose any neat structuring of migrations based on flows and characteristics of migrants and on the countries of origin and destination.

Contemporary trends and patterns of migration are different in many ways from earlier ones. Cheaper international travel and the creation of new labour markets have transformed people's mobility experiences. Moreover, new information and communication technologies have made it easier to stay in touch with family and friends in countries of origin. Perhaps one of the most striking characteristics of contemporary migration is that migrants do not simply take their social identities from one place to another; rather, they maintain a complex web of identities and activities across national borders. Most of today's migrating individuals and families neither completely assimilate into nor remain totally segregated from the societies in their destination countries. In crossing borders, they confront complex structural forces and ideological forms, and they negotiate these in complex ways. Similarly, while some groups strengthen ties with their home cultures, others loosen them, in part depending on the discourses as well as the material resources available in the “receiving” contexts. In short, most of today's migrating individuals and communities are selectively integrated into and, at the same time, segregated from multiple social and cultural spaces.

The same kinds of selective practices are relevant to the knowledges that migrants retain and receive, learn and unlearn, engage and revise. Such knowledges influence their and their children's curricular experiences both in and outside formal schools. While this selectivity is true for all learners, it is particularly significant for migrant and refugee populations because they encounter school curricula that are shaped, to a large extent, by the interests of the receiving nation-states. Yet, migrants and refugees also extend their knowledge from “back home” and interpret the newly encountered curriculum through their own epistemic lens. As such, when it comes to the curricular experiences of globally mobile populations, a neat cartography of national borders as the dominant locus of curriculum studies no longer seems to be desirable or sustainable.

For the last century, curriculum projects have been largely a national(ist) projects, shaped and bound by local and national cultures and histories (Carson, 2009). For the last two decades, however, there has been a move towards internationalization in curriculum studies as one way to address the tensions between the local and the global. This move towards internationalization in many ways has sought to address or engage “the conditions that may be emerging for a new kind of global dialogue regarding sustainable human futures” (Smith, 2003, p. 35). Since the establishment of the IAACS and the launch of its official journal Transnational Curriculum Inquiry, we have seen an increasing body of work focusing on curriculum from transnational and global perspectives. A blueprint of this internationalization project has been “creating transnational ‘spaces’ in which local knowledge traditions in curriculum inquiry can be performed together” (Gough, 2000, p. 329).

While the project of internationalizing curriculum studies has made notable contributions to the field, its primary focus has remained bound by the political borders of nation-states. Such a focus often fails to recognize that the flow of curricular knowledge does not take a simple unilateral path between state borders. Knowledge traditions interact and collide with each other in complex and unpredictable ways, much like the movements of culture that are implicit in the kinds of flows described by Ibrahim in his article (in this issue) about the GHHN. Knowledge, like cultural practice, gets circulated, revised, and reconceptualized both within and across borders before making an impact on a school's curriculum. In response to this, some scholars have suggested that for a true internationalization of the curriculum field, scholarship needs to move beyond Western traditions of curriculum inquiry. Paraskeva (2011), for instance, has argued to the need for epistemological diversity and cognitive pluralism and recommends that we “assume consciously that (an)other knowledge is possible [and] go beyond the Western epistemological platform, paying attention to other forms of knowledge and respecting indigenous knowledge within and beyond the Western space” (p. 152).

In the afterword to this special issue titled “Provisional Pedagogies toward Imagining Global Mobilities Otherwise,” Sharon Stein and Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti take up this challenge and draw on the positions articulated across the 11 articles to suggest that a new pedagogy of global mobilities is not only possible, but it is imperative. They offer a critique of the conditions that have produced the current patterns of mobility, arguing that the “current architecture of global modernity is held up by three interdependent pillars: the nation-state, global capitalism, and humanism” (p. 136). Arguing that coloniality is at the heart of the present patterns of global mobility, they propose an anti-colonial “provisional and transitional pedagogy that would push us toward the edge of what is possible, or what appears to be possible from within our current frameworks” (p. 143). Such a pedagogy would aim, first, to unpack the historical layers of how globalization has evolved as a colonial force. Second, such a pedagogy would demand a focus on the present and a reckoning with the conditions that support ongoing colonization. The third and final “layer” of such a pedagogy involves a process of imagining a future in the present. For the authors, such a “provisional and transitional pedagogy might help us trace the desires that produce harmful knowledges, identities, imaginaries, and relationships, and face the paradoxes and contradictions of our complex collective existence” (p. 144).

In light of Stein and Andreotti's reflection, as editors we wondered what might be some of the implications of the work presented in these articles for Indigenous people, education, and sovereignty. Indeed, as we read through the articles in this issue, we were struck – although perhaps not surprised – by the absence of any sustained discussion of the implications of transnationalism and global mobility for Indigenous people, particularly for those who are engaged in struggle over sovereignty in their own lands and territories. In part, as Bauman (2000) has argued, even when populations “do not move, it is often the site that is pulled from under their feet, so it feels like being on the move anyway” (p. 87), which underscore the question, is transnationalism good for Indigenous people? In what ways might transnationalism facilitate, accelerate, and (ironically perhaps) obscure the settler project?

Patel (in this issue) points to the way in which migration is imbricated in the operations of the settler state and the ongoing colonization of Indigenous land. At the same time, transnationalism is also facilitating the strengthening of ties among Indigenous peoples and movements across the globe. In Standing Rock, for instance, transnational flows of information and connections between Indigenous groups that have existed for thousands of years facilitated the participation of Indigenous peoples from around the world, a key factor in the success of the protests. Likewise, Hip Hop has also become a key site for the production of contemporary Indigenous culture (Recollet, 2015), and Indigenous people are active participants in the GHHN that Ibrahim describes in this issue.

There are many other silences in the conversations that enliven the articles in this special issue. Yet there is no doubt that – whether through the relentless operations of empire (Coloma, this issue), through the westernized hegemony underlying many of the constructions of “global citizenship” education (Bajaj & Bartlett, this issue; Nieto & Bickmore, this issue), or the marks that such “citizenship” indelibly create (Patel, this issue) – we are all, in some way another, touched by transnational systems and processes. The question, then, is whether another education is possible that might mobilize movement itself as a key site of struggle and change. The authors in this issue seem to suggest that transnationalism might open up a space for critique and intervention within the contradictions and paradoxes that drive movement as choice for some and consequence for many more.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.