tandfonline.com – Conflicting framings: Young Ghanaians’ and Dutch education professionals’ views on the impact of mobility on education

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates how Dutch education professionals and Ghanaian migrant youth frame the impact of young people’s geographical mobility on education. The paper is based on a discourse analysis of policy documentation, semi-structured interviews with education professionals and 20 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with 30 young Ghanaians (ages 16–25). The analyses show that the relationship between mobility and education has historically been problematized in the Netherlands, now permeating negative framings of mobility adopted by Dutch education professionals. Young Ghanaians, however, envision their mobility and education as positively intertwined. The comparison shows that education professionals and young Ghanaians employ frames that conflict because they draw on distinctly different notions of ‘education’ and because dominant framings produce uncompromising narratives, realities, and eventually policies.