The Geographies and Entanglements of Education and Mobility: A Focus on Black Nations and Black Immigrants, Past to Present

Abstract

Using Black geographies – a deliberate, decolonial examination of racialization, spatialization, and Black life, situated at the nexus of Black intellectual traditions and modes of inquiry – this study centers and interweaves the narratives of Black im/migrants, along with their artistic, cultural, and intellectual knowledge and artifacts, to interrogate and revise historic and contemporary understandings of Black im/migrant students’ mobility, migration, and agency. The study answers the following questions: 1) How have Black im/migrants, and Black im/migrant students specifically, understood their multiple, intersecting identities, and how do these understandings shape how they navigate societies? 2) How do they understand and engage with/disengage from advocacy, activism, and politics, 3) What do they envision for themselves as students, as migrants, and as citizens (a status that continues to hold loosely for Black people across borders)?, and 4) What bonds and/or communities sustain them transnationally and how do they envision the roles of those bonds and communities in their futures? Also drawing on and in conversation with scholarly literature, archival materials and documents, reports and white papers, government surveillance records, journal entries, letters, laws, policies and treaties, news periodicals, interviews, organizational records, photographs, and speeches, the study elucidates the politics and interrelationships of education, migration, and empire for Black im/migrants across time and space. Implications for theory and research are presented with an emphasis on students’ Diasporic worldmaking praxes and networks as central to reviving and revising the historical and contemporary record of educational and migration research and scholarship.