Group items tagged

"In this article, I examine how human wellbeing is constructed transnationally. Whereas much attention has been paid to migrants based in the North, how the out-migration of kin affects the construction of human wellbeing of those living 'back home' remains little understood. Existing literature has tended to focus on the impact of financial remittances but the broader psychosocial impacts affecting human wellbeing outcomes have received less attention. In this article I suggest that this gap might be filled by adopting a human wellbeing approach to deepen understanding of what Peru-based immediate relatives and close friends regard as the benefits and challenges of this migration. By examining how human wellbeing is constructed across material, perceptual and relational domains, this approach offers greater holism in analysis. I also extend work on 'social remittances' by offering insights into the meanings that ensure that migration continues to be regarded in Peru as a livelihood improvement strategy worth pursuing."

In this special issue we are also particularly concerned with the take up of neoliberal forms of globalization in schooling and higher education in cities, in both the Global North and South. There is a troubling inadequacy inherent in denoting the Global South and Global North, related most clearly to the invocation of a uni-directional, mostly paternal and exploitative set of relationships; whether these be of capital, of resources, of people, and so forth. Alternatively, following critical development studies, we might see the North and South in both politico-economic terms, pertaining to development, and in geographical terms (Riggs, 2007). As such an important conceptual framework for dealing with ideas of the North and South is the mutually constitutive nature of notions such as the global and local (Massey, 2005; M.P. Smith, 2001), especially the relationship to neoliberalism and space (Peck & Tickell, 2002). Understanding contemporary challenges to education in a globalized world requires attendance to space and place, and to scale; the global, national, regional, local (Robertson, 2000; Thiem, 2009), and to concepts and phenomena such as transnationalism that complicate understandings of and relations between space and place, global and local (Jackson, Crang, & Dwyer, 2004). The papers in this special issue, while not explicitly taking up spatial theorizing, nonetheless speak to a complicating of the global as producing the local, and correspondingly of the local (usually conflated with place) as always the 'victim' of the global (Massey, 2005). The papers in this special issue provide empirical and conceptual interventions that speak more to complex, relational understandings of neoliberal globalization. A relational understanding posits that: local places are not simply always the victims of the global; nor are they always politically defensible redoubts against the global. Understanding space as the constant open production of the topologies of pow

Scientific and political commentators on social 'uprisings' and political engagement among second generation immigrants in Europe often refer to quantitative indicators of structural integration in national labour and school systems. Equally, if not more,

The 22-year-old scheme, which costs EUR440 million (US$650 million) a year, is not delivering value for money, Biancheri said, and should be returned to the member states. There was a need to produce managers trained to work through the EU who were at eas

Australian universities have been active participants in the transnational education market over the past twenty years. Many Australian universities have structured various forms of franchising arrangements with universities and other education providers,

The purpose of this paper is to show the relationship between co-development projects with transnational interests and the governance of migration by the Spanish and Ecuadorian governments. On one hand, the emergence of co-development is linked with the political dimension of migration, and therefore, with the challenges that its management poses for both the sending and receiving states. Simultaneously, the state exists in a context of the reconfiguration of its traditional functions, and above all, the manner in which it goes about performing them. For these reasons, co-development projects form part of state governance strategies, based on a special understanding of the nexus between migration and development in European social space, involving international organizations, state governments, and civil society, linked by migratory flows. This is demonstrated in the case of Ecuador and Spain. Since Spain stimulated co-development, the implementation of projects with Ecuador has been emphasized, due to the dimensions achieved by Ecuadorian migration. Co-development politics and projects are analyzed in this paper as areas of intervention integrated by values, guide lines and cultural understandings about migration, including appropriate forms of control and management.

This paper identifies several key issues that have emerged through the debate over English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), and suggests a practice-based perspective-which treats language not as a fixed system but as an emergent product of speakers' practices-as a guide for reconsidering some fundamental assumptions of the ELF research project. In particular, this paper suggests viewing ELF not as a variety, but as an activity type, where the goal of interaction involves the need to communicate in a situation where the participants do not share the same first language. It claims that such a reconceptualization can help us explore the accommodative practices of ELF speakers with greater sensitivity to issues of power, enrich our understanding of intelligibility and how it is mediated by language ideologies, and develop a pedagogy that emphasizes greater cross-cultural awareness and sensitivity.

In the new European higher education space, Universities in Europe are exhorted to cultivate and develop multilingualism. The European Commission's 2004-2006 action plan for promoting language learning and diversity speaks of the need to build an environment which is favourable to languages. Yet reality indicates that it is English which reigns supreme and has become the main foreign language used as means of instruction at European universities. Internationalisation has played a key role in this process, becoming one of the main drivers of the linguistic hegemony exerted by English. In this paper we examine the opinions of teaching staff involved in English-medium instruction, from pedagogical ecology-of-language and personal viewpoints. Data were gathered using group discussion. The study was conducted at a multilingual Spanish university where majority (Spanish), minority (Basque) and foreign (English) languages coexist, resulting in some unavoidable linguistic strains. The implications for English-medium instruction are discussed at the end of this paper.

The use of English as an international language (EIL) and its implications for teaching have attracted much scholarly attention. However, much of the discussion has remained at an abstract level and not provided pedagogical ideas that are theoretically sound, informed by research, and at the same time specific enough to be useful in the classroom. This poses a great challenge for teachers: while they receive a strong message that their current practice may be inadequate in preparing learners for using English in international encounters, they are not presented with suggestions of where to start implementing changes. The goal of this paper is to build upon the existing literature on teaching English for international communication with greater emphasis on pedagogical decisions and practices in the classroom. Using the conceptualization of EIL as a function of English as an international common language rather than a linguistic variety used uniformly in all international contexts, we explore key questions in TEIL and suggest specific ways to introduce an EIL perspective to existing English language classrooms.

This paper examines the ways in which credentials from a range of education providers are used to (re)produce transnational financial elites in London's international financial district. Extant research has examined the long-standing relationship between educational background and entry into these financial labour markets. Far less attention has been paid to how the relationship between education and financial elites has changed more recently as financial labour markets have become increasingly transnational in nature and education and learning increasingly extend beyond higher education into the workplace. In response, this paper combines work on transnational elite labour markets with work from the sociology of education on the intersection between work and workplace education in order to understand the different strategies used by individuals (from both the UK and overseas) to acquire a range of credentials following their first degree in an effort to advance their careers within contemporary financial services labour markets.