Abstract for International Conference on Children of Migration, Tokyo, 25 Nov 2017

Cross-border childhoods in East Asia: the role of education

Johanna L. Waters

This paper will discuss the relationship between migrations/mobilities and education
amongst children and young people in East Asia. Drawing principally on research in Hong
Kong, the paper will attempt to conceptualise so-called ‘educational mobilities’, in order tounderstand why they are so prevalent amongst particular populations and what are theirwider implications.
This paper explores the role played by children in emergent transnational topologies andreflects on the significance of this for understandings of ‘migration’. Foregrounding
children’s mobilities evokes the idea of ‘embodied statecraft’, discussed recently Mitchelland Kallio (2017) in relation to Jennifer Hyndman’s work on feminist geopolitics (2001),
where states (and borders) are made through quotidian movements. In this paper, we argue
that children are harbingers of future migration. They are migrants ‘in the making’ and theireducational mobilities are crucial formative experiences with wider geo-social implications.
Young people’s migration in search of educational opportunities is an increasingly prevalentfacet of contemporary mobilities. Over the past decade, research in social science has paid
more attention to the importance of ‘educational migrations,’ which encompass, but are notlimited to, the movements of international students and other categories of migra nts withthe aim of securing different, or ‘better’ academic credentials. This paper examines
contemporary educational migrations through the lens of children and young people,
drawing on data from several research projects, including one on daily cross-bordercommuting (Hong Kong-Mainland China) for schooling and another on trans-Pacific,transnational migration for schooling and higher education. In this paper, I focus on asking
how children’s cross-border schooling is indicative of broader questions aroundtransnational migration, global householding and the ‘geo-social’ (Ho, 2017). I will consider
the wider implications for understanding the relationship between migration, education andsociety, including the embodied politics of border crossing for education and how itintersects with other bordering migrations and wider political concerns.

Biographical Note

Johanna Waters is an Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Oxford,
who specialises in migration, transnationalism and (international) education. Her work has
focused, largely, on East Asia and on trans-Pacific educational mobilities. She has researched‘split families’ and the transnational dispersal of households as they accumulate types of‘capital’ at different global sites. She has also focused, specifically, on university students
and recent graduates, to explore the role that mobility plays in their educational andemployment experiences. She has recently completed a large study on transnational
education in Hong Kong and is just embarking on a project on cross-border schooling (dailycommuting across state boundaries for education). Her most recent publications include:Brooks, R. and Waters, J. (2017) Materialities and Mobilities in Education. London and New
York: Routledge; Lin, I., M. Leung and J. Waters (2017) Degrees of Value: Comparing thecontextual complexities of UK Transnational Education in Malaysia and Hong Kong Compare:
A Journal of Comparative and International Education; Waters, J. and Leung, M. (2017)
Domesticating transnational education: fortifying discourses of social value and self-worth in‘meritocratic’ Hong Kong. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 42 (2): 233245 and Waters, J. (2017) Education unbound? Enlivening debates with a mobilities
perspective on learning. Progress in Human Geography 41 (3): 271 - 298