Belonging in Changing Educational Spaces: Negotiating Global, Transnational, and Neoliberal Dynamics

This book explores the impacts on personal and professional, local and global forms of belonging in educational spaces amidst rapid changes shaped by globalization.

Encouraging readers to consider the idea of belonging as an educational goal as much as a guiding educational strategy, this text forms a unique contribution to the field. Drawing on empirical and theoretical analyses, chapters illustrate how educational experience informs a sense of belonging, which is increasingly juxtaposed against a variety of global dynamics including neoliberalism, transnationalism, and global policy and practice discourses. Addressing phenomena such as refugee education, large-scale international assessments, and study abroad, the volume’s focus on ten countries including Japan, Sierra Leone, and the US demonstrates the complexities of globalization and illuminates possibilities for supporting new constructions of belonging in rapidly globalizing educational spaces.

This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in international and comparative education, multicultural education, and educational policy more broadly. Those interested in the sociology of education and cultural studies within education will also benefit from this volume.

Karen Monkman is Professor Emerita of Education at DePaul University, USA.

Ann Frkovich is Associate Professor of Research at Concordia University, USA.