Abyssal lines and cartographies of exclusion in migration and education: towards a reimagining

Educational institutions across the Western world, from schools through to universities, are increasingly being drawn into highly ideological spaces of immigration control, integration and securitisation. This paper outlines the complex contours of this ‘education-migration nexus’ and contributes to the critique of the way that education is becoming yoked to different political and social agendas. It also seeks to offer an analysis of the way in which the experiences, knowledges and practices of those from non-Western contexts become disqualified and rendered non-existent. Drawing on the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos, I develop a postcolonial analysis which exposes the partial and distorted framing of migration, migrants and integration, a framing which gives rise to the current highly restrictive role of education. The paper concludes with a reimagined conceptualisation and suggests a draft agenda for education and migration studies. This calls for a more dynamic understanding of education which is open and flexible and prepared to enter into dialogue between different knowledges and practices, rather than seeking only to assimilate and construct learners according to some predetermined image.