The background for this special issue extends at least a decade back in time, when the two of us (Mariëtte de Haan and Kevin Leander), along with other colleagues such as Sandra Ponzanesi of the Wired Up project, were reading works such as Appadurai's Modernity at Large (1996). Then, nearly a decade after Appadurai had penned his landmark book, we were trying to conceive of the relations of the movements he was concerned with to youth culture and to youth learning opportunities. How might we translate such insights on the fluid and shifting ‘scapes' of modern life, including especially, the movements of people (ethnoscapes) and movements of media (medioscapes) into an understanding of learning opportunities and learning connections in a world of increasing flows? In particular, how are these flows or forms of migration co-constituted or otherwise related to one another in modern, global life? And for whom?
We are pleased to bring together a set of studies that address such questions for us that have been growing for a long time, including during the course of our research about borders and across borders.
This special issue brings together studies located at the intersection of migration, media and learning that consider how learning practices of youth in migration are shaped by new media. The change in the mobilities of people, media, material goods that allow new connections between 'global' and 'local' life marks contemporary migration as well as social life more generally. From the perspective of how young people's lives are formed and develop, these developments provide differently distributed resources from which youth can draw, and different processes through which identities, social networks, and knowledge may be constructed.
One of our goals with this issue was to bring together different perspectives on how learning trajectories of individual learners become defined by broadly distributed networks and broadly distributed knowledge systems. It is commonly assumed that as our information systems and knowledge communities extend over larger geographical distances, are increasingly mobile, and have more flexible boundaries, the learning processes and the competencies needed to take part in these systems also change. People need to learn to handle increasingly complex systems of information, and learn to participate in multiple communities that are potentially diverse and instable. We were interested in studies that could provide insights into how these complex systems for learning and knowledge management are crafted, as well as in reports on how individual learners manage to function in such systems.
At the same time, in this issue, we are interested in making the link between the specific situation of immigrants, and or the condition of being ‘uprooted’ more generally. The so called ‘uprooted socialization' of highly instable settings might be a condition of not only of migration, but one that is increasingly part of late modern life. Learning in stable, closed, and culturally uniform settings might become the exception rather than the norm. Learning and living between highly connected, potentially diverse spaces might be just as typical for youth living with new media as for the immigrant who traditionally has been considered as juggling between multiple life worlds. Therefore, in this issue, we wanted to bring together studies that address the digital learning practices of immigrants as well as studies that focus on learning in relation to, media, globalization, and diversity in terms of a youth more generally speaking, including minority youth who are not typically well served by schools.
The papers in this issue have in common that they address new ways of studying and/or conceptualizing knowledge and learning practices as related to new technologies, and as networked across disparate spaces for learning.
Arguing from different empirical settings, contributors push the boundaries of traditional education or traditional ways of conceiving of learning and education, in particular while thinking through the consequences of being involved in multiple different, often globally oriented networks. Typically, the papers are not positioned from within traditional educational settings, but study learning in spaces as diverse as an online course that enables transnational participation (Giulia Messina Dahlberg and Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta), a community technology centre with both remote and local support (Noguerón-Liu), the homes of youth and their informal digital networks spanning the globe (Eva Lam and de Haan; Leander, Ünlüsoy and Prinsen), youth media use outside of school (Drotner and Kobbernagel) and the learning of knowledge workers in the software localization industry (Malcolm).
All of these studies show, in their own way, how technologically mediated settings challenge our thinking about learning in its relationship to confined, bounded spaces. The research even challenges our thinking about the ideals for technology-mediated spaces and networks as these ideals come into contact with empirical analyses of everyday realities. Drotner and Kobbernagel, drawing on a review of literacy studies, while also examining, through large-scale survey research, the media practices of immigrants and non-immigrants in Denmark, argue that we must study media literacy practices beyond the formal spaces of learning in order to expand our current knowledge base. Existing literacy hierarchies, they argue, seem unaware of the variety and hierarchies that exist outside of formal education. Noguerón-Liu shows from a transnational study on how Latino adult learners participate in a US-based programme that involves online support from their home countries alongside local support from facilitators. Starting out from the idea of ‘anytime anywhere’ learning, Noguerón-Li finally contests the idea of an ‘extraterritorial' learner – the online course material needed to be localized and locally resourced in order to make it work for the ‘end user’. Also addressing the theme of localization, Malcolm analyses knowledge migration in the work of software localizers in her contribution. Knowledge workers do not manufacture a physical artefact per se, but rather use their knowledge to shape digital products for global marketing. Malcolm shows from a perspective of ‘macro-epistemics' how the learning of knowledge work moved beyond the local context to wider networks, eventually reflecting on how these migratory dynamics contribute to new insights for education. Messina Dahlberg and Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta, focusing on the analysis of recorded sessions of an ‘Italian for (adult) beginners' online course, show how online learning sites give rise to forms of flexibility that support alternative ways of meaning-making, (co)constructing and mediating learning. In this study, as well as in Lam's study, language variety and language learning become focal, and in relation to issues of other forms of learning as well as identification. Lam, drawing from a comparative case study of the digital literacy practices of immigrant youth of Chinese descent, examines the cross-border social relationships that are fostered between the youth and their peers in China. She shows how these cross-border relationships generate unique social and linguistic capital other than that offered by formal education. These transnational networks enhance learning in knowledge domains and even may enable youth to craft an educational and career pathway for themselves. Such online literacy practices need to be understood, Lam argues, within the particular social fields in which they are situated. The idea of ‘field' is related to central notions in de Haan, Leander, Ünlüsoy and Prinsen, where learning networks as a concept come under the lens, and the authors show how migrant and non-migrant youth in the Netherlands develop specific networked configurations for their learning. Using the diversity of the online networks of these youth as a starting point, they critically and empirically re-consider ideals of learning networks that have been forwarded in research and writing on learning networks.
The papers in this issue present interdisciplinary work that is able to cross the boundaries of the learning sciences, media and migration. In most cases, migration is not exclusively associated with the specific position or mobilities of immigrants and more generally taken up as global mobility or ‘uprootedness'. Likewise, in the different studies this issue offers, the understanding of the learning of immigrants is captured with notions that are more generally related to uprooted socialization, and understood as a condition of this era that applies to all. For instance, the translingual and transmodal online learning Dahlberg and Bagga-Gupta describe, the transnational networks for learning de Haan et al. describe or the linguistic capital that is transnationally resourced as described by Lam are not associated with a traditional understanding of migration as movement from place of origin to place of settlement. Rather, these studies move on to more general notions of mobility that are mirrored in new ways of conceptualizing learning practices as hybrid, uprooted, glocal or transnational. Although such generalizations between immigrants and non-immigrants bring out important insights on their similarities, they also tend to overlook the specific practices of immigrants. As this issue also shows, the practices of non-mainstream groups such as immigrant youth are easily disregarded in normative discourses on, for instance, digital literacies as Drotner and Kobbernagel show, or on digital networks as de Haan, Leander, Ünlüsoy and Prinsen show. In this sense, the issue puts diversity again on the agenda for studies of learning, while also taking earlier discourses associated with migration and immigrants to a broader level of applicability.
As we get closer to examine the relations of the mobilities of people, technologies, and media, following the prescient invocation of Appadurai and others, new questions and new answers proliferate concerning such flows, their consequences, and about blockages or hindrances to flows. From earlier held conceptions, papers in this issue help challenge categories, including ‘migrant’, ‘ethnicity’,‘home’,‘local’, and ‘place’. Moreover, the movements of media, technology and people are caught up into myriad other traversals (as was articulated by Appadurai, including, in this issue, artefacts (Malcolm), language (Nogueron-Liu), and networking practices themselves (de Haan et al.). Yet, the focus on learning takes these considerations into a new direction – however complex, it is not enough to map or model the concurrence of cultural, social, and material flows across the globe or even in relation to particular individuals. Rather, questions of learning engage us into expanded conversations that have to do with how individuals and groups take up knowledge and identity resources and use such resources or change as a result of them. On offer in the issue, and most exciting we believe, are the nexus points in these contact zones – the points not merely of movement, but of stillness, where person comes together with word, image, artefact and place in a way that learning is made available, is supported, and is made meaningful, yet to ‘move' the learner out again. These nexus points of far and near coming into contact cannot be described merely through abstractions or neologisms such as ‘glocal’; rather, they must be illuminated, in all of their particularities, through observations and analyses of everyday learning as happening somewhere to someone just as it simultaneously expands globally. We believe, the authors in this issue have offered up myriad such illuminations as they have identified and traversed nexus points through research spanning several continents. We offer them up to you, in the spirit of inspiring new movement.