Cross-border childhoods in East Asia: the role of education Johanna L Cross-border childhoods in East Asia: the role of education Johanna L. Waters University of Oxford, UK Twitter: johannalwaters Email: johanna.waters@ouce.ox.ac.uk International Symposium on Children of Migration Nov. 25 2017 Rikkyo University, Tokyo

For some young people, transnational mobilities are a daily ‘fact of life’ This paper focuses on the importance of education in driving and directing international mobility It is increasingly apparent that education is a major factor in household decision-making amongst middle-class families in East Asia, and migration for education has become an increasingly normalised possibility. Going overseas for education is part of a wider selection of options when it comes to their child’s education (and not an exceptional pursuit). See Waters and Leung (2017) on the domestication of transnational education.

Satellite / parachute children ‘For many ethnic Chinese in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia...strategies of accumulation begin with the acquisition of a Western education…’ (Aihwa Ong 1999; p. 95)

Young Jin – to save her unborn child from ‘Korea’s hellish school system’ ‘Koreans are education zealots, partly because of a Confucian tradition but also because a degree from a top university is a passport to status and a comfortable life. The problem is that getting into good Korean universities has become so competitive that parents are going great distances to let their kids avoid the whole stressful mess. The favourite ticket is to get them American citizenship, which is guaranteed to anyone born on US soil’ (Ko, 2003, n.p.)

Source: South China Morning Post

How do we conceptualise these mobilities? - cultural capital - societal discourses around meritocracy and achievement

Complex relationship between education, cultural capital acquisition, and migration; Education is one aspect of cultural capital (includes embodied and institutionalised forms); Education is a key means by which cultural capital is transmitted in society: (see Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Harvard university press; Bourdieu, P. (1998). The state nobility: Elite schools in the field of power. Stanford University Press; Bourdieu, P. (1986) The forms of capital. Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. Ed. Richardson J.) ‘The middle classes have been increasingly dependent upon access to professional occupations as a means of reproducing social status and privileged life-styles between the generations [ . . . ] where access to virtually all occupational careers has come to depend upon the acquisition of credentials through formal examination.’(Brown, 1995, 31)

Widening participation and increased access to compulsory education ‘When class fractions who previously made little use of the school system enter the race for academic qualifications, the effect is to force the groups whose reproduction was mainly or exclusively achieved through education [i.e. middle-class] to step up their investments so as to maintain the relative scarcity of their qualifications and, consequently, their position in the class structure.’ (Bourdieu, 1984, 133) In what ways do middle-class families ‘step up their investments’? They go overseas for education; the reproduction of social status becomes transnational.

Whilst the benefits of international mobility have for a long time been assumed, more recent work has questioned this assumption. Can it, at times, be dysfunctional? [see Waters, J. L. (2015). ‘Dysfunctional mobilities: international education and the chaos of movement’. In Handbook of Children and Youth Studies (pp. 679-688). Springer]. The maternal sacrifice (Yeoh and Huang, 2005; Waters, 2015) Disempowered children (Waters, 2003) Destruction of familial bonds/relations Goal of cultural capital accumulation undermined

In conclusion More understanding is needed on the geographies of cultural capital conversion; the contextual specificities of conversion More understanding is needed of the social inequalities that can result from educational migrations – particularly in ‘local’ contexts (the impact of domestication of international education). Waters, J.L. and Leung, M.W.H. (2017) Domesticating transnational education: discourses of social value, self-worth and the institutionalisation of failure in ‘meritocratic’ Hong Kong. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42(2): 233-245.