Frontiers of cosmopolitanism: Educational enclaves and the extractive roots of international schools.

Matthieu Bolay,Jeanne Rey

doi:10.1177/0308275x211059655

Matthieu Bolay, Jeanne Rey

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x211059655

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Abstract

This article situates international expatriate schools in their cultural and political economy by drawing attention to the tensions between a cosmopolitan educational ethos and processes of social, economic and legal enclavement. Based on extensive multi-sited ethnographic research in the international school sector, we show how cosmopolitan claims of openness mirror a relative closure and ‘offshore-like’ enclavement. To do so, we build upon the notions of modularity and extractivism, which we use as heuristics to analyse social and spatial practices of defining boundaries. Gazing beyond the main foundational myth of international schools, we first outline their concomitant extractive roots. Second, we shed light on the conditions of international teachers’ circulation worldwide. Third, we examine the territorial entanglements and disentanglements that characterise international schools. Finally, we investigate the tensions induced by a cosmopolitan educational ethos whose discourse of inclusion is inevitably paired with practices of exclusion.

Highlights

This article situates international expatriate schools in their cultural and political economy by drawing attention to the tensions between a cosmopolitan educational ethos and processes of social, economic and legal enclavement
By paying attention to an alternative genealogy of international education, one that locates the schools’ roots in extractive industries, we were able to foreground the functional role that a modular form of schooling plays in fostering the mobility of expatriate employees across enclaves at expanding extractive frontiers
Despite the salience of this alternative origin, the official myth of the International School of Geneva remains central to understanding the rise of international schools, especially with regard to the ways in which abstract cosmopolitan ideals are recontextualised by means of selective entanglements with the local environment

Summary

Introduction

This article situates international expatriate schools in their cultural and political economy by drawing attention to the tensions between a cosmopolitan educational ethos and processes of social, economic and legal enclavement. The second foundational myth views schooling abroad through a functional lens and situates the origin of the schools in the context of the infrastructure built for Dutch mining corporation Shell’s first oil extraction operations in Malaysia (Brummitt and Keeling, 2013).

Results

Conclusion