Ruth Cheung Judge Talk

Please join the Department of Childhood Studies and Ruth Cheung Judge as she presents “‘Educational Return’ in the Nigeiran Diaspora”  on Tuesday, November 19th from 12:45 – 1:45 PM in the Childhood Studies Department located at 329 Cooper Street in Room 101.  Registration is suggested.  Please register below by November 12th.

‘Educational Return’ in the Nigerian Diaspora
In the Nigerian diaspora, adolescent children who have grown up in the US and UK are sometimes sent to spend a few years being schooled ‘back home’ in Nigeria due to parental concerns around their behaviour or educational attainment. Existing scholarship on ‘educational return’ and transnational parenting is limited and has tended to center on adult views. Based on qualitative research in Newark, London, and Lagos, this paper deepens understanding of young people’s firsthand experiences of ‘educational return’, analysed in intergenerational perspective. The paper will explore work-in-progress themes, such as: what the practice of ‘homeland education’ reveals about the classed and racialised contexts of migrant and transnational lives; how young people’s emergent subjectivities are shaped by experiences of transnational education; and the methodological and theoretical challenges of studying transnational childhoods. 

Ruth Cheung Judge is a postdoctoral researcher exploring educational mobilities within the Nigerian diaspora. Funded by the EU’s Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellowship, she is working with Prof. Cati Coe at Rutgers-Camden, before returning to the UK to complete the project at University College London. UCL Geography was also where she completed her PhD in 2016, in an ethnographic project focused on how imaginaries of global charity relate to classed politics in the UK. Connecting both projects is her interest in critical exploration of how transnational mobility (in both embodied and imaginative dimensions) relates to young people’s subjectivities.