Motility, viscosity and field: A portrayal of migrant teachers' professional mobility and ethical conflicts in American and Australian faith‐based schools

Abstract

International migration is attaining new records, diversifying nations' cultural-social landscapes. The number of international migrants is estimated to be about 272 million globally, with nearly two-thirds being labour migrants, surpassing historic projections. Concomitantly, migrant teachers are becoming more prevalent in educational markets; spaces that may serve as institutional vehicles promoting social cohesion and tolerance. Acknowledging that such spaces have an increasing share of faith-based schools-settings that foreground particular groups' cultural and social values-this critical analysis seeks to identify how migrant teachers' aspirations are shaped and ethically negotiated in seemingly exclusive educational sites. Drawing upon migrant teacher interviews from American and Australian faithbased schools, and utilising concepts of motility and institutional viscosity, this paper captures the schools' 'viscous' conditions and complex facilitation through which educators professionally move and ethically navigate their practice. Bourdieu's thinking tools of field, habitus, capital and symbolic violence provided a supplementary theoretical framework that draws attention | 1009 MIGRANT TEACHERS' PROFESSIONAL MOBILITY AND ETHICAL CONFLICTS 'Notions of network and fluids can illuminate the "global"' (Urry , 2000, p. 48