Changing Educational Migration: Asian Mobilities, Migrant Students and New Directions In the Sociology of Education

Educational migration is changing in scale, direction and meaning. International student mobility, family-led educational migration, refugee and forced-migration pathways, cross-border schooling, internal rural–urban migration, and post-study transitions now intersect with demographic change, geopolitical uncertainty, labour-market restructuring, digitalisation, and increasingly selective migration regimes. These developments require renewed sociological attention to migrant students not only as recipients of educational policy, but also as actors whose aspirations, resources, constraints and trajectories reshape schools, universities, families and destination societies.

This session invites papers examining migrant students across educational levels, institutional settings and national contexts. We particularly welcome contributions on Asian migrant students and Asian educational mobilities, including movements within Asia, from Asia to Anglophone and European destinations, and between education and work. At the same time, the session is deliberately comparative and open to studies from all regions.

Possible themes include migrant students’ aspirations and achievement; social class, gender, ethnicity and citizenship in educational migration; refugee and asylum-seeking students; international student transitions into labour markets; parental strategies and transnational families; cross-border schooling; language, belonging and discrimination; institutional responses to mobility; and the consequences of changing visa, migration and higher-education policies.

The session welcomes quantitative, qualitative, mixed-methods, comparative, historical and policy-oriented papers that contribute to a broader sociology of education in turbulent times.