A narrative exploration of agency in the education-migration nexus

• Published in: Asia Pacific education review Vol. 24; no. 4; pp. 633 - 645
• Main Author: Brotherhood, Thomas
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.12.2023; Springer; Springer Nature B.V; 교육연구소
• Subjects: Education; Foreign Countries; Foreign Students; Goal Orientation; Migrants; Migration; Personal Autonomy; Research Methodology; Student Attitudes; Student Mobility; 교육학; United Kingdom; Japan; Student migration; Narrative methods; Agency; UK; Japan
• ISSN: 1598-1037; 1876-407X
• DOI: 10.1007/s12564-023-09859-9

This paper employs narrative research methods to provide new theoretical and empirical insights into the role of individual agency in student migration. The paper begins with a theoretical exploration of agency in international migration, broadly conceived, and applies this to student migration specifically. This exploration emphasizes the strengths of a life-course perspective in analyzing the role of individual agency in student-migration journeys, as this perspective is sensitive to temporality. Following this approach, the paper offers a novel theoretical framework for analyzing student-migration, drawing on Emirbayer & Mische’s (Emirbayer and Mische, American Journal of Sociology 103:962–1023, 1998) ‘chordal triad’ model of agency, and presents analysis of 18-months of narrative data collection with 26 international student-migrants in the UK and Japan. Interview data demonstrate how three agentive orientations—habit, imagination, and judgment—are each associated with specific tactics that individuals can use to navigate the challenging terrain of their student migration trajectories. Participants also exhibited changing agentive orientations over time. The results of this analysis indicate that the role of agency is dynamic within the education-migration nexus, changing in relation to: (1) the evolving relationship between individual student-migrants and their contexts, and (2) the simultaneous evolution of each individual’s life-course project. In summary, while student-migrants are influenced by context, they also exhibit the capacity to evolve and adapt agentively in the pursuit of their goals.