Cultural identity in multilocal spaces

ABSTRACT

The vast differences in how spaces can be perceived and scientifically examined have long been a central topic in education science, and not only since the spatial turn (Löw 2011, Schroer 2018, Glaser et al. 2018, Pardo/Patro 2018). In order to unlock the wide range of diverse perspectives on spaces, in this special issue we seek to build and review the learning and education theory potential of multilocal points of access. What can be learned if one assumes spaces to be multilocal and asks, for example, how the different cultures of family spaces can be, which atmospheres they shape for the different members of the family, or how they arise through co-present, or even virtual or imaginative, relationing? In this case, multilocality appears, for example, as a family practice of connecting very different, individual locations. We are then interested in investigating how a childhood can be examined as a passing through of diverse spaces, as well as initial attempts to design one’s own spaces, for example by building ‘dens’ in corn fields or in nursery spaces. One can also ask how children use, or find new uses for, the social spaces of adults. Here, multilocality unlocks access to the simultaneity of different spatial structures in the same location. Although it also occurs at an earlier age, it is when children reach school in particular that one can observe how differently the same locations can be/are entered into, and social differences (re)produced. The same classroom is home to very different students with very different starting points in schooling. Not all individuals know how to position themselves in a space in such a way that their positioning is recognised and thus accepted by society. Consequently, although all the students are being taught in the same place, not all are sitting in the same classroom. Another multilocal space, the university, also often fails to offer a shared place of different thinking, it could be characterised by its diversity of possible perspectives and thus different location dependencies and reflections thereon.

The vast differences in how spaces can be perceived and scientifically examined have long been a central topic in education science, and not only since the spatial turn (Glaser, Koller, Thole, & Krumme, 2018, Löw, 2011, Pardo & Prato, 2018, Schroer, 2018). In order to unlock the wide range of diverse perspectives on spaces, in this special issue we seek to build and review the learning and education theory potential of multilocal points of access. What can be learned if one assumes spaces to be multilocal and asks, for example, how the different cultures of family spaces can be, which atmospheres they shape for the different members of the family, or how they arise through co-present, or even virtual or imaginative, relationing? In this case, multilocality appears, for example, as a family practice of connecting very different, individual locations. We are then interested in investigating how childhood can be examined as a passing through of diverse spaces, as well as initial attempts to design one’s own spaces, for example by building “dens” in corn fields or in nursery spaces. One can also ask how children use, or find new uses for, the social spaces of adults. Here, multilocality unlocks access to the simultaneity of different spatial structures in the same location.

Although it also occurs at an earlier age, it is when children reach school in particular that one can observe how differently the same locations can be/are entered into, and social differences (re)produced. The same classroom is home to very different students with very different starting points in schooling. Focusing on the multilocality of classrooms is a particularly useful way to describe how the interplay between space and person reproduces social inequalities. Not all individuals know how to position themselves in a space in such a way that their positioning is recognised and thus accepted by society. Consequently, although all the students are being taught in the same place, not all are sitting in the same classroom. Another multilocal space, the university, also often fails to offer a shared place of different thinking, it could be characterised by its diversity of possible perspectives and thus different location dependencies and reflections thereon. As such, its multilocal constitution derives, for example, from the opportunities for reflecting on first-party and third-party location dependencies.

From a general pedagogic perspective, the way in which reciprocal contact, interconnection, connection, and penetration without a defined result occurs between spaces and people (Jörissen in this special issue, Engel, 2019a, 2019b) can be discussed on the basis of identity theories drawn from cultural science, which assume a procedural constitution (Ricken, 2013, Zirfas & Jörissen, 2007). Therefore, in our topological logic of cognition, we are interested in cultural identities less as entitary parameters or parameters to be defined,¹ and more as fluid processes of connective opportunities between people and spaces. Two aspects are important to us here. The first is the need to trace the complexities of identity formation processes, whose procedural constitution can also be examined socio-critically, based on the work of Stuart Hall: “to see and recognise the different parts and histories of ourselves, to construct those points of identification, those positionalities we call in retrospect our ‘cultural identities’” (Hall, 1994, p. 237, Abebe, in press; Williams & Chrisman, 2013).¹ Second, we assume that every new encounter between (societal) spaces and people creates new regimes of space creation, in which we are interested in the multilocal dimensions of the reciprocal penetration, materialisation, and (re)produced character (Thieme, 2008, 2017). In doing so, we are drawing on a definition tradition that originated in anthropology (Ember & Ember, 1972), and which is currently applied across disciplines (space research in various subjects, agricultural sciences, sociology, and so on). For our focus, human geographical research perspectives (see Danielzyk, 2016), but also sociological and cultural studies, for instance that by Petzold (2013), have proven central, as they critically discuss a multilocal conduct of life and associated orders of space (Deshingkar & Farrington, 2009, Vasta, 2010). Although the term “multilocality” has repeatedly been used selectively in pedagogy, thus far it has been in family research that it has been primarily used systematically as a pedagogic category (Geisen, 2018, Schinkel, 2018).

In our view, however, the potential of being able to make transmigrant movements in the glocalised space accessible (Schmidt-Kallert, 2011, Clemens, 2016a, 2016b), and thus scrutinise conventional concepts of space and associated, often discriminatory, attributions, is of particular interest in education science discourse. We start by providing a literary introduction to the different space configurations. Alongside empirical data, literary descriptions of spaces unlock diverse, plural and transgressive forms of access (Jörissen, 2015) to the multi-dimensionality of spaces of experience (Nohl, 2010, 2013). In this context, “education science and pedagogic work [is faced with] the task of keeping the spaces of the differences open and standing up against the yearning for unambiguousness” (Messerschmidt, 2018, p. 193). By asking how different spaces can be made accessible (including being critical of society) in terms of their potential to create a diverse range of identities, the search for features of the multilocal space constitutions listed below is arranged in a way that is always sensitive to difference. To achieve this, we examine four significant fields of socialisation – family, nursery, school, and university – and take snapshots of scenic space descriptions that enable us to observe the potential of relational practices in the space to create identities and biographies (Engel, 2019b).

People and spaces – biographies in their multilocal constitution

Which spaces do people pass through during their lives; which spaces touch, move, and shape them?

Family spaces

Under the title “Abreise und Rückkehr” [Departure and Return] Walter Benjamin described his childhood memories from Berlin in approximately 1900. His descriptions are very expressive in showing how varied the atmospheric perception of spaces can be:

“The strip of light under the bedroom door, in the early evening, when the others were still up – was it not the first signal of a journey? Did it not push its way into a child’s night full of expectation, just as the strip of light under a stage curtain would later push its way into the night of an audience? I believe that the ship of dreams that picked us up then often hovered before our beds above the noise of the waves of conversation and the surf of clattering plates, and in the morning it put us down, fevered, as if we had already completed the journey that we were about to begin.” (Benjamin, 2016, p. 29, translation: JE/BF)

The multilocality of space formation is seen here in its atmospheric dimension, which concerns “something […] undetermined, difficult to say” (Böhme, 1995, p. 21). It is “outside that of which one can rationally give an account” (ibid.). The idea of atmosphere is productive in discussing the multilocality of spaces because “atmospheres [are undetermined], in particular in relation to their ontological status” (ibid., p. 22).

“One does not know exactly whether one should attribute them to the objects or environments from which they emerge or to the subjects they experience. One does not know exactly where they are. In a certain sense, they appear to fill the space with a tone of feeling, like a mist” (ibid.: translation: JE/BF).

Benjamin defines the space according to its simultaneity of occurrences, such as the child falling asleep and the adults talking. This enables different locations to be present in the same space. In addition, another simultaneity shapes the atmospheric emphasis of the space in which the child falls asleep: Benjamin associates the perception of the light through the crack under the door and the voices behind the door with the excited wait for the curtain to open in a theatre. The imaginary space is introduced here as the third dimension of the atmospheric multilocal constitution of spaces, using the example of the dream and its very particular temporality. It is thus possible to record that – even, or indeed particularly, in childhood – Benjamin is identifying processes of atmospheric space formation through temporal components that link the light, sounds, moods, imagination, and memories in such a way that they also shape future access to spaces in a way that creates cultural identities. However, Benjamin’s literary description also indicates another aspect of the multilocality of family spaces: families are challenged to create shared atmospheres (in the simultaneity of difference practices that localise, i.e. determine the space and its atmospheres), albeit through interactive rather than per se harmonious negotiation processes. Status-related, generational, and gender-specific relationship settings are (re)produced in this way (Audehm, 2007). “Cohabiting as a family [is thus founded] on a practice of living together whose dynamic structure is fragile and recurrent and needs to be balanced out implicitly and in detail and processed through communication” (Schinkel, 2018, p. 81: translation: JE/BF). It is therefore possible to ask how education processes, for example, in or of the family change given multilocal conditions.

Asking this question requires not only a discussion of developments in the mobility of working parents or children who move between “patchwork” families, for example, but also thinking about or indeed reconsidering the local positioning of the family from contemporary points of view (following on from Geisen, 2018). The familiar space formation processes associated with this (Simmel, 2006) are driven forward by further multilocalising dynamics. The “rapid expansion of options for mobility and communication”, and the fact of “digital media becoming integral to everyday life and correspondingly new space of possibilities for social networking” go hand in hand with a relativisation of “physical proximity as a field of action” (ibid., p. 82: translation: JE/BF) that makes it possible to discuss the multilocality of spaces against the background of (post)digital cultural theories. According to this the digitalised – via social media platforms, such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and so on – “virtual dimension of the representation (and its charging with meaning) – on a family reality beyond its temporary ‘realisation’ through co-presence” (ibid., p. 91: translation: JE/BF) creates entirely new forms of multilocality as a digitalised networking of different family locations. Research related to migration also highlights the fact that, “belonging and identification in multilocal families […] are not limited to a single location [but that JE/BF] the familial culture itself initially gives the family members a feeling of belonging that contributes to the cohesion of the family when it is spread across different regions, countries, and continents” (Geisen, 2018, p. 99: translation: JE/BF). Cultural identities thus also, and especially, form in the processes of “relationing” with family spaces.

Nurseries and/as transitional spaces

“A three-and-a-half-year-old boy, attending nursery for the first time, hides under a small table next to the wall, returns to this place every day for weeks, arranges it with pieces of fabric and calls it his “cave” (cf. Stieve, 2008, p. 222). Not as a table, but as a small, intimate corner, the furniture becomes a transitional object that offers a place between the internal need and the external unfamiliar […]. For weeks, the boy needs his ‘table’ in order to take sometimes frightened, sometimes brave excursions into the space that is defined by the other children’s play” (Stieve, 2013, p. 100: translation: JE/BF).

In his paper on the significance of “things” to childhoods, Claus Stieve addresses the space orientation of children from a phenomenological perspective. His example shows multiple spaces being formed in the children’s group space – a multilocal network. In his example, the boy uses fabric to build a protective cave under the table that becomes his space within the space. It offers him a protective (emotional) space in which he can hide and take refuge, at least according to the author’s observation. From there, the boy can once again undertake new journeys into the large nursery space that is still unfamiliar territory to him. Here, it is interesting to see which spaces children highlight as giving identity in their simultaneity. The children group space becomes a space of (generational and status-related) pedagogic authority and, thus, power relationships that colour the use of space and, thus, cultural processes of identity formation – for example, in relation to the question of who helps to decide about the use and design of the room, when and how. It becomes a space for friendship and conflict, with the associated territorial practices of limitation and boundaries; for example, when negotiating who is allowed to join in play, when, how and where. It also becomes a space that gives identity, as the children mimetically (re)design the world of adults and social order through play or by copying it with things and furniture,² for example “baking cakes” in a doll’s kitchen. Or, as Martha Muchow analysed as far back as 1930 in her study on the living space of a city child, a space that is repurposed and appropriated in a highly tactical and wilful way, for example in negotiations with the gatekeeper of a warehouse (Muchow & Moreau, 2012, p. 148).

It is thus possible to show how space research in general pedagogy is sensitive to the multilocality of nursery spaces and the associated sketches of childhood in terms of the identity-forming potential. Space research appears to maintain the normative practices of children’s education with spaces occupying a central position.

“Those childhood spaces have ever been filled with images, expectations, rationales and norms about children’s needs and nature. This is also why, as Zeiher and Zeiher (1994) note, the places that children find for themselves reveal specifically which position a society assigns to them (see also Aitken, 1994; Philo, 2000)” (Bollig & Millei, 2018, p. 6).

Institutional frameworks must therefore also, and especially, be investigated from a (socio)critical point of view as limitations of childhood spaces.

“Likewise, more recent spatial regimes in early childhood, such as the flexibilisation of ECEC services leading to more free use of time and space in day care institutions, positions children to become ‘self-managing choice-makers’ (Kjørholt & Seland, 2012; Millei, 2012). The constructions of spaces for childhood, therefore, do not only allocate certain spaces to children. As interrelations of emplacement, positioning, and subjectivation they also form the basis for the day-to-day experiences of being a child. In other words: they locate children’s shifting identities” (Bollig & Millei, 2018, p. 6, 7).

A multilocal research perspective thus unlocks new perspectives on both the spatialisation of childhoods and the space formation practices of children. The interplay between socially institutionalised childhood spaces and children’s practices of multilocalised (re)purposing of the spaces that occur here can then be investigated in more detail in terms of their identity-forming potential.

School and education spaces – on spatial practices of the (re)production of social orders

“During the time we lived in this social housing flat, I also started at the town’s ‘boys’ grammar school’. It was a big day that would revolutionise the story of our family. I was the very first on whom higher education was to be bestowed, and even the first small step on this road was like a sensation. My brother, who was two years older, had stayed at the local school. In France back then, these were the only two options; academic selection came early and with full force. A year later, he was due to begin a butcher’s apprenticeship. He no longer wanted to go to school, where he was so bored, and that he found a ‘waste of time’, as he himself put it. One day, my mother saw a sign with the words ‘Apprentice wanted’ on the door of a butcher’s shop and asked my brother whether he was interested in the profession. He said yes, they went there, and the matter was sealed.” (Eribon, 2016, p. 101: translation: JE/BF)

This description of the first step into a school system by Didier Eribon clearly demonstrates how closely (in)secure access to certain spaces is linked to selection processes in society. Whether one feels safe in the classroom, finds one’s place, whether the chairs, tables, pictures and board become familiar, if one effortlessly becomes part of the spatial arrangement, or stands out like a sore thumb, helps to decide on the identity-giving opportunities to become familiar with spaces. In the above narrative, the mother’s decision to step into the butcher’s shop on the way home, and the quick decision in favour of an apprenticeship in this experiential space, reveal how the multilocality of life stories is shaped in a way that incorporates selection in society. Markus Rieger-Ladich and Christian Grabau similarly demonstrate how spaces come into contact with questions of self-esteem through functions and messages (Rieger-Ladich & Grabau, 2016). By referring to a series of pedagogic and cultural facilities, they criticise exclusive practices that make it more difficult or even impossible for certain social groups to participate in society. They suspect institutions like schools, museums and libraries have specific spatial-material arrangements that also induce feelings of inferiority and shame in certain groups and milieus (see also: Berndt, Kalisch, & Krüger, 2016). They make clear how “spatial-material arrangements are always coded in a certain way that means that they have to apply as sediment of class and group-related values – and consequently are experienced differently by different students. These develop a fine sense not only of this coding, but also of (a lack of) fit and the positioning of their own person within the class and the school community” (Rieger-Ladich & Grabau, 2016, p. 112: translation: JE/BF).

This inclusive and exclusive multilocality of the school as a location can also be understood from an ideology-critical perspective, through (progressive) pedagogic spaces. “Be it a cosy corner or a computer room, a workbench or a virtual world, a non-rectangular building and coloured walls or self-controllable materials, a sports hall or a theatre, a school garden or the café of a youth club: all these spaces had and have to be propagated as auspicious, promising innovations in order for society to leave space for learning” (Göhlich, 2011, p. 499: translation: JE/BF). Rendering the subject of discourse in society, school spaces are associated with corresponding hopes and promise that link their design to certain conceptions of people and world orders, and associated spatial arrangements. A multilocality of school spaces understood in this way creates sensitivity to its identity-giving connection with socially normative orders; “and this also through the material shape, through the design vocabulary of the building, which sometimes act like social ushers” (Rieger-Ladich & Grabau, 2016, p. 113). Here, the space results from the simultaneity of selecting and integrating the reproduction mechanisms of the identity-giving room, (re)purposing “school as a space of society, which generates specific ideas for how pedagogic actions should be ordered” (Hummrich, 2018, p. 252). To achieve this, the school space is perceived both as an organised order (for example, based on curricula and guidelines and school laws specific to school culture) and also as (re)designed through actions (ibid.), and thus (re)produced in society.

University spaces and practices of visibly invisible distinctions

“No more than her comrades could she say how the others see her. Furthermore, it is her greatest desire not to be seen. She is more one of the ignored. She is a good, albeit not brilliant, student, and she is very quiet. Her fellow students are not to find out that her parents run a shop. She is embarrassed that she constantly thinks about food, that she has missed a period, that she does not know anyone that goes to university, that she wears a jacket made from artificial leather, not real.” (Ernaux, 2017, p. 79:: translation: JE/BF)

Regardless of the opportunity to study, i.e. to enter the space of the university, Annie Ernaux describes an existential, identity-giving feeling of shame that expresses itself, not least in the need to become invisible to “the others” in the space. In further descriptions of the university space, this results from anticipated looks and affection/rejection on the part of others. Here, the university appears predominantly as a socially configured space whose multilocality results from different discourse positions, like a net in which Ernaux becomes entangled. Didier Eribon also enters spaces at the university, but they remain alien to one him. Erneaux descirbes her similar feeling of staying outside:

“‘Aller à la fac’, going to university, that was what every student wanted. Here, too, the ignorance of educational hierarchies and selection mechanisms often leads to highly counterproductive decisions. Entirely of one’s own volition, one chooses a path that leads to self-depreciation, and then goes as far as to congratulate oneself for this, while others who know better give this path a wide berth. […] The descent might be slower, the exclusion take place later, but the distance between the rulers and the ruled remains constant. It reproduces itself by moving.” (Ernaux, 2017, p. 79:: translation: JE/BF)

In the context of studies in education, as well as higher education, it is important to relinquish the idea of a clear identity concept and examine cultural identities – for example, students at university – as hybrid and procedural entities beyond any claim to universal validity (see Reay, Crozier, & James, 2011; Reay, Crozier, & Clayton, 2010).

In all four types of spaces, it has become clear how unequally life spaces are distributed and how predetermined who gains identity-giving access to which rooms, and how, is. In addition, it has been shown how widely movement within the spaces differs, and how the spaces thus become materialised institutions within society. According to Löw, “these spatial arrangements materialised into institutions become firmly established as order structures of society” (Löw, 2011, p. 58: translation: JE/BF). Here, the pedagogic perspective is particularly interested in the options for the interplay between space and cultural identity-forming processes, and discusses in a critical, i.e. power-sensitive, way which restrictions and limitations are (re)produced. “This means that the topological dimension of the culture relates both to the constitution of spaces in the sense of moving orders – equally demarcating orders and ordering processes produced through actions – and on the positioning in unique, usually marked and nameable locations” (Löw, 2011, p. 46, italics in original: translation: JE/BF).

From the point of view of general pedagogy, the dimensions of multilocality in space theory can be defined in terms of their identity-giving potential:

• The multilocality of spaces in their atmospheric dimension, which affects the sensual and aesthetic perceptions of numerous aspects of space (smells, colours, temperature, and so on) and thus yields a space-related “reflexivity in the sensual” (Mersch, 2015), “Senses of the Subject” (Butler, 2015) and epistemologien (Spivak, 2013) as a subjectifying practice in its identity-giving potential.

• The multilocality that shapes the temporal logic of space perceptions. Past, present, and future are linked with spatial orders in such a way that the spaces and materialised arrangements become biographical contemporary witnesses, which shape subjectifying (as temporally normative order) perception (Engel 2019b, Engel, Göhlich, & Möller, 2019a, Gebhardt, Engel, Paul, & Kirchmann, im Erscheinen).

• The multilocality that shapes locations as spaces in society (Eribon, 2016, Ernaux, 2017), for example with corresponding mechanisms of selection and integration, and contains identity-giving offers of belonging and measures for exclusion (Jörissen in this volume).

• Multilocality as a human movement practice, for example in transnational networks, as an identity-giving mobility between locations (Danielzyk, 2016, Petzold, 2013, Clemens & Vollmer, 2018, Clemens in this volume).

• The multilocality in socially configured spatial arrangements, the identity-giving presence of different subject positionings in spaces (Engel, 2019a, 2019b, Spivak, 2013).

This special issue intends to make multilocal lifeworlds the object of qualitative-empirical educational studies and will explore ongoing processes of cultural identity formation from an international perspective. It aims to take a closer look at the influence of multilocal (i.e. globally interconnected) spaces on educational processes. Contributions focus on multilocal spaces including high schools and universities, nations, and segregated areas, and their capacity to influence cultural identity formation. They analyse the biographical and daily perception, production, transition, and transgression of spaces, the way in which those processes create senses of identity, and explore their potential to initiate processes of learning. They are also critical of the unequal distribution of resources, which often determines the possibilities of educational processes through a multilocal social structure. The sustainability of spatial theories for pedagogic subjects is explored on the basis of a theory and empiricism of multilocal living spaces and their influence on cultural identity formation.

The special issue consists of four contributions discussing the above issues from the perspective of educational studies and anthropology, and focusing on diverse themes like students’ transnational mobility, Traveller women’s identities, discussions on globalisation in high schools, and educational challenges in segregated areas./These four papers are followed by two comments on all contributions: in her comments, Iris Clemens explores the trinity of identity, space, and connections, and calls for a concept of culture that captures the relationality of the social. In his comments, Benjamin Jörissen focuses on the relationship between identities, spaciality, and mediality.

Following up on the theoretical reflection in the first part of this introduction, below we will present the four studies addressing four questions that we regard as crucial with regard to the inquiry into processes of identity formation in multilocal lifeworlds:

• How can the experience of multilocality in its sensual, temporal, subjectifying, mobile and social dimension, and its consequences for negotiations of identity, be methodically and theoretically understood?

• Which consequences of those experiences are mapped out for processes of identity formation in specific biographical phases?

• In what way are the explored experiences of mulitilocality and their effects on questions of identity structured by mechanisms of segregation/integration and by power dynamics?

• How are educational spaces shaped by multilocality and educational processes influenced by multilocalitys’ effects on (cultural) identities?

Satoko Shao-Kobayashi from Chiba University in Japan uses multi-site ethnography and discourse analysis of follow-up interviews conducted over of period of ten years to explore intra-ethnic relationships and identities as well as processes of transition experienced by high school students in California who came from Japan for high school and returned to Japan for college, known as “kikoku” in Japanese. Theoretically, the study is inspired by approaches that view identity as being constantly negotiated in relation to others across time and place and, in particular, Appadurais;s (1988) reflections on multivocality. Additionally, the author is inspired by theories on othering practices, especially in relation to coethics.

The biographical phase Shao-Kobayashi examines is characterised by high performance requirements; the students returning to Japan from the US must pass an entrance exam before they can enter college. It is also associated with negotiations on differences, friendships, and questions of status amongst peers, which are strongly linked with questions of identity. As the author makes clear, “kikoku” students tend to pursue practices of othering and labelling through constant negotiations and renegotiations of identity. The author also points out that, paradoxically, the “kikoku” students use such practices to differentiate themselves from other Japanese students, as well as with the aim of becoming part of the Japanese student circle. Some, but not all, can use the “kikoku” status to climb up the social, academic, and career ladders in Japan.

“Kikoku” students can be regarded as exemplary in current education environments and systems containing ever-changing student populations. The special examination “Kikoku” students have to pass in Japan was implemented in order to help them by opening up a different gateway to access university education. As Satoko Shao-Kobayashis’s study makes clear, this entrance examination system has merely mimicked another entrance exam template, disregarding the actual situation many of the students studying overseas and returning to Japan find themselves in.

Also referring to an ethnographic study, Tamsin Cavaliero and Martin Levinson from the University of Bath, England, discuss the fluctuation in Irish Traveller identities, focusing on young women who have moved between Ireland and England. The authors emphasise the ethical challenges associated with research involving a vulnerable community that mistrusts the written word. In their analysis of the data the authors were inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) reflections on knowledge as being multi-dimensional and non-hierarchical. Thus, their research involved ongoing discussions with participants, facilitating opportunities for negotiated understandings. From a theoretical perspective, they refer to theories on multiple and hybrid identities and to Goffman’s (1963) concept of “passing”, whereby an individual decides not to disclose an aspect of their identity.

The research sheds light on the diverse strategies these young women employ in order to negotiate questions of identity. As in Shao-Kobayashis’s study, the observed negotiations of identity are very much linked to questions of status and power in society: for example, some of the young women encouraged the idea of being taken for Polish. As the Polish community are perceived as outsiders in Irish culture, and assigned a second-class status, but are still more privileged than the Traveller community, the practice of “Polishing” can also be interpreted as an attempt to gain a more privileged status in society. As such, the influx of foreign nationals into Ireland creates opportunities to define alternate identity. Although the authors do not explicitly discuss questions of education, from the viewpoint of educational studies it is very interesting to see that it is especially the experience of travelling between countries and of living in an increasingly multicultural society which opens up space for playful and creative ways for those young women to comprehend identities.

In their paper, Juliane Engel, Michael Göhlich, and Elke Möller from the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany discuss how cultural identity emerges from spatial and social localisation by exploring what occurs in high school classrooms at a performative level. Their reasoning is based on two video samples, recorded in social science lessons in the 10th grade, both of which focus on the subjects of glocalisation and globalisation. The video recordings were made as part of a research project on modes of ethical judgement and social science education undertaken in four high schools situated in southern Germany and triangulates the videographic data with questionnaires and group discussions. In relation to the observational cameras used, the authors clarify the importance of reflecting the videographer’s tacit ethical guidelines, highlighting the question of whether research contributes to processes of modernisation when filming an individual being ostracised by classmates. Theoretically the paper is informed by Robertson’s (1992) concept of localisation, which denotes the interrelation between the local and the global, as well as an intersection with urban sociological and geographical perspectives (Löw, 2011, 2016) (which helps to analyse global influences in classrooms), and also by Spivaks’s (1988) reflections on subalternity. Additionally, they are inspired by Bhabha’s (2012) reflections on the “Third Space” and hybridisation, and Guitierrez et al.’s (2003) argument which imply that Third Spaces promote the expansion of learning.

The paper thus focuses on a space clearly marked as educational, and on the biographical phase of adolescence. This means that students’ interactions take place within the framework of appraisal of achievement, by both school representatives and by peers. In both scenarios, a student named Isabella is treated as subaltern by her classmates. In the authors’ interpretations they stress that Isabella’s position in class depends not only on her relationship to other students, but also to objects, such as an image, that she uses in order to present a concretisation of the abstract issue of globalisation. They argue that students’ cultural identities are negotiated simultaneously corresponding to performative logics, and sometimes also along a colonialist linguistic track. By presenting images of globalisation to the class, Isabella enters a stage that makes her a subaltern who is laughed at. The explicit evaluation of abstract ethical problems on a global scale undertaken in the classroom is, in this way, detached from the ethical dimension of interaction between physically present students in a local space.Similar to the already outlined papers, this article also stresses the strong link between negotiations of identity in multilocal spaces with questions of status and power. In addition, it emphasises the importance of a reflection on, and dealing with, those power relations in educational settings, which aim to initiate a discourse and explore ethical questions.

The fourth study presented in the special issue was undertaken by Dennis Beach (University of Gothenburg, Sweden), Bettina Fritzsche (University of Education Freiburg, Germany), and Michalis Kakos (Leeds Beckett University, UK). It analyses the particular educational challenges emerging in segregated areas, looking at the Nordic countries, Germany, and England. Methodologically, it is based on the trans-local and trans-temporal methodological approach of meta-ethnography (Noblit & Hare, 1988) and qualitative meta-analysis. As such, the authors take into account the results of ethnographic studies undertaken in the three analysed regions; however, they do not simply summarise the results of those studies, but take into consideration the way the data was collected in the particular context. The aim is not to compare the situation in the different regions, but rather to compare the results from ethnographic studies about race, pedagogy/education, and inclusion at particular sites in specific instances. As such, the authors focus on the educational possibilities opened up to and withdrawn from youth in specific deprived areas. Theoretically, they refer to Bourdieu and Passerons’ (1970) reflections on the reproduction of social inequality in the education system.

Their results clearly show how, in all the analysed European regions, formal education supports the devaluation of young migrants in segregated areas. It also makes clear that it is left to the creativity of the youth in question to belie this labelling and stigmatisation and to develop new associations with their cultural heritage and negotiate their identities.

In relation to policy, the authors make clear that, paradoxically, policies for the protection and inclusion of the vulnerable may be contributing to their marginalisation, a source of vulnerability. Thus, the authors promote a renunciation of the portrayal of youth in segregated areas as being “hopeless” or “impossible”.

A synopsis of the four contributions in the special issue makes clear that an analysis of identity formation in multilocal spaces very often involves new and innovative methodical approaches and, as often specific vulnerable groups are involved in the research, ethical considerations must form an important part of the methodology. Theoretically, concepts of space and identity developed in postcolonial studies are often fruitful, but are not the only theoretical source referred to.

In most of the papers, the creative aspect of the analysed identity formations undertaken in multilocal spaces is stressed, and all of them make clear that those negotiations are strongly linked to negotiations of status and power in society. Especially in relation to education, the results highlight the increasing necessity of reflecting, that educational processes nowadays are most often influenced by processes of glocalisation and migration and thus by translocality, and then that those influences require an increased sensitivity to the creativity, but also vulnerability, of students’ identity formation.

Acknowledgments

We thank all the reviewers who provided invaluable comments and feedback to authors in this special issue. We also thank the journal for providing language editing free of charge and access to these important contributions to research on the topics of cultural identity theories and space.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Juliane Engel

Juliane Engel PhD, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Education, FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg. Her research interests include qualitative, culture-comparative analysis of visual methods in education, the (in-)visibility of learning processes and research in the socio-cultural field with marginalised young people in schools.

Notes

¹ We don’t use the singular of cultural identity in the sense, Spivak rewrites “cultural identity” as “national origin validation” (Spivak 1992/1997, p. 137). We relate to the postmodern discourse modus and understand identity as a forming processes (see Clemens in this volume).

² Spatial perspectives in childhood studies also raise important questions about children’s own geographies, or children’s spaces in contrast to those assigned to children by adults, such as children’s services (Bollig & Kelle, 2016; Moss & Petrie, 2002; Qvortrup, Corsaro, & Honig, 2009).