Performing Educational Desires
Mobilities and Relating in Migrant Students’ Educational Trajectories
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Abstract
This article discusses the educational aspirations of students of “migrant background” at a German university. It focuses its attention on the nexus of mobility and in/equality in the realm of higher education while especially addressing the affective tensions and related processes of contested belonging that students experience during their educational course. Understanding family constellations as “regimes of belonging,” the contribution analyzes how relations experienced by students in their familial settings—often entailing intergenerational dramas—bear on the study course and on the personal constellations within the university settings. Following students’ trajectories, who move to the universities in order to perform specific educational desires that are more or less guided by their parents’ visions, it is shown that universities may become protected realms of relatedness in which the students experience new forms of personal freedom and belonging—apart from, but often in continuity with, the rules of commonality and reciprocity as experienced within their families back home.
Contributor Notes
Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University, Germany. Until July 2019, she was a Member of the Senate of the German Research Foundation, Dean of the Faculty of Sociology, and Co-Director of the Centre of Interdisciplinary Research. Her research currently focuses on knowledge production and circulation, on belonging, as well as on the “social life” of universities (especially the nexus of inequality and heterogeneity). She studied and worked at the University of Zurich before working at the University of Bonn and for a number of development organizations and for the International Committee of the Red Cross. She has also taught at several universities, including Bern, Oxford, Tokyo, Jawaharlal Nehru (New Delhi), and Kathmandu. Email: joanna.pfaff@uni-bielefeld.de