Karen Valentin,
Associate Professor, Ph.D.
Department of Education, Aarhus University

The project Youth, Education and Migration: the Case of Young Nepalese in North India (2007-2010) (funded by FFU/Danida, Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs) focuses on the role of education among young Nepalese people who have migrated to India during the years of and in the aftermath of the armed conflict between government and Maoist forces. The project sheds light on the importance of education, broadly defined, for understanding the relationship between youth, physical mobility and processes of social change.  Firstly, how declining formal educational opportunities, combined with lack of employment and fear of recruitment to the armed forces, have motivated young Nepalese people to migrate as part of wider strategies of social mobility. Secondly, how skills acquired, formally and informally through practice-oriented, work-based learning during the migration process are, not just considered necessary for the sustenance of a livelihood, but also become instrumental in young migrants’ plans and imaginings of further mobility beyond Nepal and India. Drawing attention to the multiple learning paths through which young Nepalese migrants in India pursue social mobility and how this is embedded in longstanding traditions of migration between the two countries, the project thus acknowledges the complexity of migration-related decisions as well as the intersection of educational, geographical  and social trajectories in a context of political and economic instability.

Through a comparative perspective and a transnational optic, the project Education, Mobility and Citizenship. An anthropological study of educational migration to Denmark (2010-2013) (PI; funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research / Humanities) examines how young migrants from Nepal, the Philippines and Ukraine seek to establish a life for themselves while in Denmark and how educational programmes help them acquire new social, academic and technical skills that in a long-term perspective can potentially improve not just their own social and economic position, but also that of their families left behind. The project thus sheds light on the double-edged importance of education for young migrants as a way to gain societal membership, or cultural citizenship, in new locations and as a short and long-term strategy of geographical and social mobility. The sub-study of Nepalese students in particular draws attention to the ways in which a number of factors – especially the post-conflict situation in Nepal, the global marketization of education and the demand for unskilled labor in certain sectors of the Danish labor market - have fostered new migration routes and practices. Furthermore it sheds light on intersection of student migration and unskilled labor migration from the global South to the global North and how this is embedded in structural global inequalities.

(www.dpu.dk/edumobcit)

In continuation of this, the project The Returns of Educational Migration and its Impact on the rebuilding of New Nepal (2011-2015) (sub-study of the collaborative project “Nepal on the Move. Conflict, migration and stability” funded by FFU/Danida, Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, PI Jens Seeberg, AU) focuses on transnational educational migration as a potential resource for democracy-building in Nepal, both in relation to the formation of an educated population and to a potential increase in political and civic engagement furthered by migrants’ experiences with other political systems and ideas. It explores the returns of migration from two perspectives; firstly, how returnee migrants who have studied and obtained degrees abroad use the acquired academic, technical and social skills when re-establishing a life back in Nepal and how this can potentially contribute to build up new institutional structures. Secondly, to what extent, if at all, economic and social remittances are used to invest in the education of younger generations, which in a longer perspective may contribute to increased social awareness and political engagement.

All three projects are based on ethnographic fieldwork in India, Denmark and Nepal and are further informed by knowledge gained from extensive fieldwork conducted in a squatter settlement in Kathmandu on educational strategies among the urban poor.