Spatializing the Scholarly Imagination: Globalisation, Refugees and Education

This paper looks at asylum seekers and refugees – marginal subjects from marginal spaces – to consider knowledge assumptions about globalisation. It applies key concepts from the governmentality school to explore the Australian state’s treatment of refugees and asylum seekers and links this to historical ways of governing space, place and the other. At a historical moment that features much talk about a borderless world and global connectivity, the state’s management of refugees and asylum seekers suggests that old ontologies of space, time and identity remain functional. We suggest that a preoccupation with strategic cosmopolitanism works against establishing moral proximity with the marginal subjects and spaces of globalisation such as refugees and asylum seekers. We conclude by considering ethical implications for transnational curriculum development.