Thinking and working with ‘diasporic education’: the challenges and possibilities of a concept

The educational activities of migrant and/or minoritised communities, and the disadvantages those communities face in education have been of interest to sociologists for a long time. Although a strong conceptual vocabulary exists in the field, in my own work I have often found the concept of diaspora to be a powerful and generative analytical tool with which to approach the complex dynamics of racially, ethnically and religiously diverse educational contexts. Traditionally, ‘diaspora’ refers to the migration of groups or communities of people from a place of origin (a ‘homeland’) and their subsequent settlement in different parts of world. Importantly, however, it also references a set of complex and ongoing dynamics related to settlement, transnationality and hybridity which are significant for our unfolding understandings of social relations and collective and individual identities generally, but also specifically around educational practices (see, Demir, 2022; Tölölyan, 2007; Gholami, 2017a, 2017b).

I began to explore the educational relevance of the diaspora concept in my research on so-called supplementary schools, including empirical research in Iranian schools in London. Based on this work, I developed in 2017 a definition and initial framework for ‘diasporic education’ whose aim was to act as a springboard for further theoretical, methodological and practical/pedagogical discussions. Diasporic education, I argued, refers to “concrete educational practices that:

Come to exist through the transnational connections of diasporic communities;

Engage and problematise notions of ‘home’ and ‘host’ (and thus ‘self’, ‘other’);

Are aimed at improving the lives of diasporans as settled citizens of ‘host’ nation-states, usually in ways that fall outside the ability (or willingness) of mainstream education;

Prevent the ‘closure’ of essentialist hegemonies at national and ethnic/denominational levels; and

Cannot be ultimately regulated by national or ethnic/denominational policies and ideologies” (Gholami, 2017a, p. 576).

The need for such forms of educational practice is evident in the context of rampant racism and Islamophobia in education systems across the Global North (Doharty, 2018; Gillborn, 2014; Leath et al., 2019; Scott-Baumann, 2017). Examining the ‘minority spaces’ in which diasporic groups ‘do education’ can offer us, I argue, fresh conceptual, political and pedagogical vocabularies for addressing long-standing educational inequities.