Panel 142: Education, Knowledge and Mobility in Africa

The Association of Research on Education and Knowledge (Association de Recherche sur l’Education et les Savoirs – ARES) propose to organize a panel on the theme of “Education, knowledge and mobility in Africa”. Here, “mobility” refers to its geographical meaning (residential mobility, migration, relocation…), and “Africa” refers to its larger extent (including Maghreb and Mashrek).

Firstly, the panel would be to focus, from a shared thematic field, on issues which have usually been dealt with separately (school mobility, student mobility, child fosterage, nomadism, circulation of knowledge…). Secondly, our aim is to give visibility to the research studies on education and knowledge in Africa, as no previous panel has covered this specific issue in the former ECAS. We argue that education (and knowledge) is a crucial issue to understand the current changes on the continent. This meeting would also encourage an exchange of ideas and partnership between researchers who work on close or related thematic fields in the area of education and knowledge from the perspective of mobility. We suggest three possible themes to explore the links between education, knowledge and mobility in Africa: a first line would explore how education/knowledge triggers mobility. Secondly we would question how mobility impacts on education and on the construction, the ownership or the monopoly of knowledge. Thirdly we would deal with the specific case of student mobility.