Joint seminar Sussex Africa Centre with SCMR and Geography

Everyone welcome!

In the Nigerian diaspora, children who have grown up in the US and UK are sometimes sent to spend a few years being schooled ‘back home’ in Nigeria due to parental concerns around their behaviour or educational attainment. Based on research in London, and Lagos, this paper deepens understanding of young people’s first-hand experiences of ‘educational return’, analysed in intergenerational perspective. The paper will explore work-in-progress themes, such as: what the practice of ‘homeland education’ reveals about the classed and racialised contexts of migrant and transnational lives; how young people’s emergent subjectivities are shaped by experiences of transnational education; and the methodological and theoretical challenges of studying transnational childhoods.

Dr Ruth Cheung Judge is Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellow, at UCL Dept of Geography and Rutgers University, Dept of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice.  Her PhD focussed on how imaginaries of global charity relate to classed politics in the UK, and her research interests are in critical exploration of how transnational mobility (in both embodied and imaginative dimensions) relates to young people’s subjectivities. Her publications include: ‘Negotiating Blackness: Young British volunteers’ embodied performances of race between Hackney and Zimbabwe’, published in a journal special issue on ‘Reconstituting Race in Youth Studies’ (Young, 2016); ‘Emotion, volunteer tourism and marginalised youth (Children’s Emotions in Policy and Practice, 2015) and ‘Transnational Youth Mobilities: emotion, inequities and temporalities’ (Population, Space and Place, 2020).

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By: Martin Wingfield
Last updated: Monday, 3 February 2020