Researching transnational mobility and education: toward learning mobility for epistemic justice

Employing transnational mobilities as the over-arching theoretical framework, this conceptual article examines the emerging trends and patterns of transnational mobility and its relationship with education. It explores the various ways in which mobility and immobility are produced with respect to transnational migration, refugee movement, and international student mobility. Despite the overstated claim that mobility is a fundamental right in some Western liberal democracies, the analysis shows that mobility as a resource is not equally accessed and distributed. It is argued that all forms of mobilities are political and as such they are implicated in the production of power and relations of domination. The analysis also highlights how a racialised regime of mobility simultaneously manufactures mobility, immobility, and downward social mobility as a social project in the circulation of people and resources. To dismantle the epistemic injustice, this article proposes learning mobility for epistemic justice as an alternative framework that problematises how racial inequalities influence mobility and immobility, knowledge production and recognition, and power in the mobility-immobility-downward social mobility scheme.