On geopolitics and education: Interventions, possibilities, and future directions

Abstract

In this article, I survey the rapidly developing literature on the symbiotic relationship between the education sector and geopolitics. Scholars across disciplines increasingly have studied how schools are implicated in and affected by broader geopolitical goals, particularly related to territorial security and national defense. Given the range of disciplinary interventions from international relations to education studies, discussions on the school‐geopolitics nexus often have been isolated and placed in relationship to other disciplinary conversations, forestalling rich cross‐disciplinary engagements to advance theorizations on the relationship between education and geopolitics. This review article, therefore, places studies on schools and geopolitics in conversation with each other and plots future directions for this emerging subfield. In doing so, I call on geographers to further engage the multi‐scalar analytics of feminist geopolitics, which can generate a more nuanced understanding of the school‐geopolitics nexus by more fully accounting for how geopolitical processes are differentially experienced, negotiated, and contested and for how the education sector itself maintains its own internal logics and contradictions irreducible to the external forces exerted on it.

Tracing young people's engagements with the diplomacy and geopolitics of a British Overseas Territory

“…In the UK, young people are encouraged to critically explore questions related to global governance, geopolitics and borders as part of the A Level Geography curriculum (Dodds, 2016; Kyndt, 2015). More broadly, Nguyen (2020, p. 5) points out that while ‘schools serve as critical sites to achieve the state's geopolitical goals, students, teachers, and communities regularly negotiate, contest, and contribute to these social processes’. It is clear, then, that young people do not passively receive geopolitical narratives presented to them and can reinterpret and ‘reshape them in sometimes unpredictable ways’ across a range of contexts (Lizotte & Nguyen, 2020, p. 934).…”

Historical geographies of alternative, and non‐formal education: Learning from the histories of Black education

“…Necessarily capacious, much early scholarship that emerged in the 2000s focused on formal spaces of education and learning such as schools, nurseries, and universities, and the experiences, inequalities, political formations, and identities that produce them (Collins & Coleman, 2008). Hanson Thiem's (2009) foundational call for ‘outward‐looking’ analyses that situate education and learning as generative—that is to say productive of rather than produced by processes of political change and economic transformation—has precipitated work addressing education's intersections with geopolitics (Müller, 2011; Nguyen, 2020) and neoliberalism (work in this vein has also cohered under ‘critical geographies of education’, see e.g. Henry, 2020; McCreary et al., 2013; Mitchell, 2018; Nguyen et al., 2017).…”