Reproducing Middle-Class Subjectivities: Educational Migration, Transnationalism, and British Nigerian Youth

Abstract

Drawing on research with British Nigerian youth who were sent to boarding school in Nigeria, I argue that such movement, and the transnational practices that it engenders, serve as a family accumulation strategy and are central to reproducing middle-class subjectivities. Their transnational practices lead to the accumulation of cultural capital, in the form of educational qualifications and particular dispositions, and social capital, in the form of extended friendship networks. Parents endeavor to give their children the best educational and networking opportunities and, in so doing, distance them from places and people in London that they devalue and see as morally degenerate, yet paradoxically, it is their children's performance of Britishness that serves as a form of cultural capital and endows them with status in the eyes of their contemporaries at boarding school in Nigeria.