Calenda - Education in the Borderlands: Promises, Utopias and Realities
▻http://calenda.org/381515
Argument
Thousands of people transmigrate daily between countries around the world. Amongst these daily transmigrants, many children and young people cross a national border as un/documented to receive an education. These ‘transfronterizos’ are to be found in places as diverse as the borderlands between the USA and Mexico, China and Burma, or Malaysia and Singapore but also in many border refugee camps. In this volume this phenomenon is referred to as Education in the Borderlands (EiB). According to Passi (2011: 13), there are more than “300 land borders and scores of sea boundaries” between the 200 states or so that compose the world. This means that there are, in theory, as many possible cases of education in the borderlands.
For Thomas Adam (2012: 1) even if national borders appear (increasingly) to be turned into fortified political borders, they are “certainly not impenetrable”. Wastl-Walter (2011: 2) adds that “borders are (…) complex spatial and social phenomena which are not static or invariable but which must be understood as highly dynamic”. Depending on the context, borders might be non-material or material (barbed-wire fence, a door, heavily-guarded, etc.) (ibid.).
#frontières #cross-borders #helsinki (nouveau tag)