Asian Migration and Education Cultures in the Anglosphere

Asian migration and mobilities are transforming education cultures in the Anglosphere, prompting mounting debates about ‘tiger mothers’ and ‘dragon children’, and competition and segregation in Anglosphere schools. This book challenges the cultural essentialism which prevails in much academic and popular discussion of ‘Asian success’ and in relation to Asian education mobilities.

As anxiety and aspiration within these spaces are increasingly ethnicised, the children of Asian migrants are both admired and resented for their educational success. This book explores popular perceptions of Asian migrant families through in-depth empirically informed accounts on the broader economic, social, historical and geo-political contexts within which education cultures are produced. This includes contributions from academics on global markets and national policies around migration and education, classed trajectories and articulations, local formations of ‘ethnic capital’, and transnational assemblages that produce education and mobility as means for social advancement.

At a time when our schooling systems and communities are undergoing rapid transformations as a result of increasing global mobility, this book is a unique and important contribution to an issue of pressing significance.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Megan Watkins is Professor in the Institute for Culture and Society and the School of Education at Western Sydney University, Australia. Her research interests lie in the cultural analysis of education and the formation of human subjectivities, in particular how different cultural practices can engender divergent habits and dispositions to learning.

Christina Ho is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia, where she researches migration and cultural diversity. Her current work focuses on education, diversity and inequality, and the politics of urban inter-cultural relations.

Rose Butler is an ARC DECRA Fellow and sociologist of childhood and youth at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University, Australia. Her research focuses on class and culture, multiculturalism and globalisation, schooling and social change, and rural livelihoods. She is currently investigating the changing landscape of rural multicultures for young people.