Johannah Fahey

Staying ahead of the game: the globalising practices of elite schools

How are elite schools caught up in the changing processes of globalisation? Is globalisation a new phenomenon for them? This paper focuses on the globalising practices that selected elite schools adopt. It also explores how globalisation is impacting on the social purposes of elite schools, which conventionally have been to serve privileged social groups. It seeks to begin a conversation about whether such schools are involved in securing advantage for social grouping that exists beyond the nation state on the global stage. It draws from a multisited global ethnography of elite schools in globalising circumstances.

The Knowledge Economy and Innovation: Certain Uncertainty and the Risk Economy.

The knowledge economy is a dominant force in todays world, and innovation policy and national systems of innovation are central to it. In this article, we draw on different sociological and economic theories of risk to engage critically with innovation policy and national systems of innovation. Becks understanding of a risk society, Schumpeters innovation thesis, and Perezs techno-economic paradigm are used to consider the risk economy, and the broader risk implications of knowledge economy policies and their associated innovation systems. Derridas theory of haunting provides the methodological framework for our discussion. We use his notion of “hauntology” to conceptualize the risk economy as a ghost that haunts knowledge economy policies and systems. The spectral risk economy draws attention to the inherent instability of the knowledge economy, and challenges the certainty of its economic dogma by offering an alternative perspective. The risk economy problematizes knowledge economy policies and systems by revealing the uncertain and “undecidable” future of social, political and cultural hazards ignored in the interest of commercial gain.

International academic mobility: Problematic and possible paradigms

‘Brain drain(re) gain’, ‘high skills mobility’ and ‘talent wars’ are among the titles given to the international movement of and competition for people with the expertise and aptitudes that are highly regarded and in demand around the world. Research into and policies concerned with the movement of such people has quite a long and differentiated history and includes work on the international mobility of university academics. However, since the rise of the notion of the knowledge economy and since the highly skilled have become more internationally mobile, many nation-states have sponsored inquiries into the particular implications for them and have developed policies that suit their specific geo-political situation. Indeed the region of Europe has done so too. Much government policy on the international mobility of the highly skilled arises from research on migration, labour mobility and markets, and on ‘development’ issues in the ‘global South’. The entry point is national economic growth and competitiveness and the reasoning is derived from ‘human capital’ theory: human capital translates into economic capital that translates into national economic growth and competitiveness. The bulk of this research is from the disciplines of economics and demography. The resurgence of interest in the international mobility of the highly skilled has, however, been accompanied by a body of research that draws from different disciplines and also from studies of globalisation and transnationalism. While such research may be in conversation with the dominant paradigms and policies mentioned above it also draws on and/or develops alternative concepts. Further, while it may have policy implications it may be driven by different imperatives and thus raise additional issues for consideration; particularly issues of power and politics writ large and small. The papers to follow in this Special Section belong to this latter body of research. They come from the field of education and focus on academic mobility. Together they imply that earlier paradigms have not sufficiently considered the epistemological, ontological or ethical issues associated with international academic mobility. In epistemological terms they offer and invite further consideration of the links between knowledge and mobility. In ontological terms, they draw attention to what it means to be a mobile academic and offer insights into the lives of these individuals and to the ways in which mobile academics as a group are stratified internally. In terms of ethical considerations, the papers suggest we need to be more conscious and critical

Multi-Sited Global Ethnography and Travel: Gendered Journeys in Three Registers.

This paper joins a barely begun conversation about multi-sited and global ethnography in educational research; a conversation that is likely to intensify along with growing interest in the links between education, globalisation, internationalisation and transnationalism. Drawing on an ongoing multi-sited global ethnography of elite schools and globalisation, this paper explores the role of travel in multi-sited global ethnography and offers a feminist engagement with it. It considers the idea of fieldwork as a travel practice through three different travel registers; the traveller’s tale, critical travel studies and travel as exile. In so doing, it illustrates the reflexive affordances each register offers with regard to the directions of our feminist inquiries into elite schools and our feminist ethnographic practices.

Thinking in a ‘worldly’ way: mobility, knowledge, power and geography

In order to enhance understandings of the international mobility of researchers and the implications of their mobility for knowledge production and circulation, we need to develop more sophisticated conceptual resources. Here we draw on and seek to develop ideas generated from literary theory and geography in order to highlight the links between internationally mobile researchers, knowledge, geography and power. In particular, we develop three interrelated concepts: ‘geographies of power/knowledge’, ‘empires of knowledge’, and ‘edges of empires’. We also turn to Edward Saids notion of the ‘exilic intellectual’ because it speaks to the manner in which some mobile individuals navigate this terrain, as well as to issues of their links to place, positionality and the academy. The paper puts these concepts to work as we ask ‘What do they look like through the lens of an individuals intellectual biography?’ and ‘How can a biography add nuance to the concepts?’ Overall we adopt what Said calls a ‘worldly’ perspective that involves considering the time and place of ideas.

The Libidinal Economy of the Globalising Elite School Market

Elite schools are banks of emotion where the individuals and social classes that they serve deposit their desires and gain social dividends. They are also registers of social recognition and serve as spaces of collective capacity for their privileged clients. Elite schools have long been sites for the exercise of a form of affective agency by the wealthy and socially powerful. Many such people and groups have heavy emotional investments in the schools that their families have attended over several generations. Habitual use of such schools, over extended time, signifies their enduring social stature. Other wealthy parents, those without such cross-generational attachments to a particular school but with ardent social aspirations, search relentlessly for an elite school that matches their desires and assures their children’s educational and social ascendency.

The gift economy of elite schooling: the changing contours and contradictions of privileged benefaction

Privileged benefaction in elite schools and the moral dilemmas, contradictions and power politics involved are the focus of this paper. The notion of ‘the gift’ provides our analytical lens. We concentrate on two girls’ schools – one in South Africa and one in England. These were both built, in various ways, on the British model of public schooling. These schools pride themselves on their gifting practices. We offer a broad overview of the different local and global manifestations of and justifications for these practices as they occur in these schools and in the transnational organisations of which the schools are members.

The research imagination in a world on the move

This paper focuses on the shifting terrain of mobile researchers beginning with an overview of research and research policy on ‘brain mobility’, and then discussing what we call their optical illusions/delusions. Subsequently, our main purpose is to elaborate on a line of inquiry that offers richer notions of researcher mobility, connectivity and globalisation than those employed in current policies and their usual research base. Indeed we seek to conceptually enrich the field of research on ‘brain mobility’ by bringing it into dialogue with anthropological discussions of cultural globalisation. We argue that global ethnography offers considerable potential as an alternative methodology particularly when accompanied by the notion of global assemblage. We unpack these concepts showing how we are deploying them in a current project of ours which is exploring the contemporary configurations of knowledge, culture and connection that come about through researchers movements, and which seeks to contribute to socio‐cultural studies of contemporary knowledge flows and of global research governance.

Privileged girls: the place of femininity and femininity in place

Constructions of femininity and attendant notions of feminism are being produced in different ways in different places around the world. This is a complicated global process that cannot be reduced to analyses that take place in nation states. This paper seeks to respond to and enhance Angela McRobbies compelling argument about understandings of contemporary girlhood, primarily in the UK context, by drawing into the fold Aihwa Ongs powerful thinking around theories of transnationality. Rather than repeating arguments about constructions of femininity that are invariably articulated within national confines, the discussion demonstrates the transnational nature of these subjective constructions by referring to recent ethnographic research undertaken in two elite schools in England and India, and focusing particularly on in-depth interviews and focus groups conducted with some of the young women who attend these schools.

Is greed still good? Was it ever? Exploring the emoscapes of the global financial crisis

We seek to contribute to political and policy analyses of globalisation by attending to global flows of emotions and by developing the concept global emoscapes. In so doing we build on Arjun Appadurai’s theorisation of the disjunctive scapes of the global cultural economy. As a way of illustrating the benefits of our approach, we deploy it to analyse the scapes associated with the global financial crisis. We show how emoscapes are entangled with financescapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes in the broader context of the global capitalist economy, particularly its most recent manifestation in the form of ‘financialisation’. Our overall implication is that attention to emoscapes helps to enrich critical analyses of policy and politics. We hope that this paper inspires others to build on our approach to conduct research on education policy.