2.1 Movement and transition

We build on transition, a core concept within youth studies and young people's geographies that has undergone various theoretical and methodological changes. This concept often relates to the transition from one educational context to another, such as the transition from elementary to secondary school or from compulsory education to post-compulsory education or work (Holloway and Jöns, 2012; Bitzi and Landolt, 2017, in this special issue; Rérat, 2016, in this special issue). These educational transitions certainly involve processes of selection that reproduce social inequalities and thus are both important and relevant for engaged research and practice (Bauer, 2018, in this special issue). An overly static and linear pattern of thinking about youth transitions has been criticized over the last two decades by many scholars for failing to account both for biographical ruptures and discontinuities and for the delayed, multiple, and uncertain transitions that are part of young people's everyday lives (Hörschelmann, 2011:379; also Cuervo and Wyn, 2014; Brown et al., 2012; Evans, 2008; MacDonald et al., 2005; Valentine, 2003; Skelton, 2002; Hörschelmann, 2018, in this special issue). By juxtaposing movement with transition, we focus on these critiques. Transitions themselves are fluid and in movement. For instance, scholars researching migration, transitions, and education have advocated broader thinking about youth transitions. They argue that immigrant youth are likely to be affected by translocal lives and experience complex intersections of educational transitions and migration (e.g. Robertson et al., 2018; Smith et al., 2014; Tse and Waters, 2013; Brooks et al., 2012; Bitzi and Landolt, 2017, in this special issue). Patrick Rérat's article draws on rich empirical material from Switzerland and addresses internal migration that occurs during the transition from higher education to the labour market. He conceptualizes migration choices as the outcome of combining a variety of rationales, including affective (social and love life), sensitive (residential amenities), and utilitarian (job opportunities) as much as calculating logics (financial elements). The article thus demonstrates that migration decisions in the context of transition from higher education to the labour market depend on a variety of constraints.

Transitions of young people have extensively been studied based on established categories of distinction, such as spatial mobility, social inequality, or educational aspirations. However, geographers have been less attentive to emotional or affective aspects accompanying transitional processes. However, research focusing on the nexus of emotions and transitions is able to show that emotions have powerful effects with respect to practices of categorizations and selections. For social scientists it is not only important to understand which effects emotions have on e.g. educational decision-making processes. Rather, they are eager to understand how emotions and “affects” (Pile, 2010; Thien, 2005) are being assembled and in which ways these affectual aspects relate to young people's geographies of education and aspiration (e.g. Brown, 2011; Christie, 2009; Pimlott-Wilson, 2016; Tse and Waters, 2013; Zembylas, 2012). As a consequence, emotional realms of transitions advance the discourse to a post-structural framing that acknowledges and analyses transitions also as ruptured, messy, affectual, and fluid.

In her article on emotional geographies in plural transitions of young people from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds in Leipzig (Germany), Kathrin Hörschelmann demonstrates the benefit of this approach (see also Laketa and Suleymanova, 2017, in this special issue). Drawing on her participants' accounts of interpersonal conflicts and how these young people negotiate the resulting emotions in their diverse everyday experiences and institutional contexts, she shows that interpersonal conflicts evoke emotions well beyond the present moment and the local spatial context. To capture these interrelated movements, she argues, we have to focus on emotions not merely as bounded or as an embodied relation to place. Moreover, we may consider emotions “as an embodied medium through which time–spaces are brought into connection and boundaries are transgressed, maintained, and/or (re)produced” (Hörschelmann, 2018:31). Hörschelmann develops an approach of unbounded emotional geographies to examine how emotions also affect the education trajectories and future career options of her research participants. She suggests a way to do greater justice to the diverse and complex personal histories and subjectivities of young people.

2.2 Spaces and identities

Subjects and subjectivity in particular involve endless points of reference, such as age, gender, sexuality, language, and place. These are constantly negotiated, differentiated, and set in relation to each other and are part of co-constructing fluid subjectivities of learning. Approaching subjects in learning and education from a post-structuralist perspective enables us to focus on fluidity, changeability, and the performance of identities in intersections with spaces of learning and education (e.g. Davis, 2006; Mulcahy, 2010; Thomas, 2005; Valentine, 2000; Mulcahy, 2017, in this special issue). From a relational perspective that conceptualizes spaces and places as “power-filled social relations” (Massey, 1994, 2005), spaces of learning can also be seen as ongoing processes constituted by temporary encounters between people and things. Such an approach helps to focus on questions that address power relations on various scales and in various encounters that produce spaces and identities of learning and education (e.g. Bauer, 2015; Kraftl, 2013; Landolt, 2013; Bitzi and Landolt, 2017, in this special issue; Laketa and Suleymanova, 2017, in this special issue). This approach puts places of learning in relation to other places of formal and informal learning and education (Leander et al., 2010; Valentine, 2000; Hörschelmann, 2018, in this special issue). It also brings the global, national, and local dimensions of the geographies of learning into a fruitful exchange (Hörschelmann and Schäfer, 2005, 2007; Jeffrey, 2010; Kölbel, 2015; Thieme, 2014). Finally, such an approach enables young people's geographies in learning and education to be examined as events emerging in interrelations in various and contradictory narratives, practices, policies, and educational discourses on interrelated scales (Bauer, 2016; Benwell, 2014; Müller, 2011).

In their paper, Suncana Laketa and Dilyara Suleymanova follow this line of thought and move the debate on to the role of education in nation-building processes and the formation of national identities. Their empirical work has been conducted in two quite different places. Both Tatarstan and Bosnia and Herzegovina are multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies confronted with politically divisive events. Laketa and Suleymanova ask an important question: “In what ways does a past that is muted within a school history curriculum continue to speak and structure the relationship of the school present?” (Laketa and Suleymanova, 2017:5, this special issue). They argue that pupils' subjectivities are produced in a negotiation of collective and official top-down educational discourses (represented through textbooks, for example) with the individual and resistant practices of teachers and pupils. In examining such negotiations, they elaborate the role of emotions in reproducing highly controversial pasts in the spaces of the school present. Their contribution highlights how educational spaces can turn into sites of learning where absent and/or muted pasts become alive and are linked to presences.

Barbara Bitzi and Sara Landolt's paper follows Mohammed, Reza, and Merhawit, three unaccompanied minor asylum seekers living in a collective centre for unaccompanied minor asylum seekers aged 12 years and older in Switzerland. These young people encounter several spaces of education, the internal school at the collective centre, public mainstream classes, and non-school spaces that are connected to school via social networks. Bitzi and Landolt thus examine how educational arrangements can produce feelings of belonging and non-belonging and highlight that these feelings are entangled with life experiences and the responsibilities of unaccompanied minor asylum seekers in their daily lives in Switzerland. Conceptually, they bring a relational thinking of spaces of education together with Judith Butler's work on subjection and unfold these in the context of refugee education.

2.3 Education and assemblages

Once young people in all their individuality and diversity enter formal education, they tend to become homogenized as a group or a class. The same process seems to apply to learning within education. Despite ongoing criticism, the imagination of the classroom as the location or the “black box” of formal learning tends to remain a principle that is hard to deviate from, both in educational research and in practice. Hence, we feel it is time to give more room to alternative imaginations and narrations. Scientists in educational research and geographies of education point out that post-structural concepts such as relational space and socio-material approaches to education enable us to understand classrooms and schools as networks, assemblages, and affective school datascapes (Fenwick and Edwards, 2010; Finn, 2016; Fox, 2009).

In her article, Dianne Mulcahy uses an assemblage approach to elaborate her concept of liminal spaces of learning, which assemble affects, bodies, and objects at a museum. Empirically, her argument is based on a 1-year video case study of 40 students' engagement with learning at three museum venues of Museums Victoria, an Australian organization. Interestingly, Dianne Mulcahy's explanation of liminal space knits together different threads of thought: Massey's “spatiality”, which sees space as something that is permanently being made, and the Deleuzian metaphor of the rhizome, “characterized by openness, indeterminacy and movement” (Mulcahy, 2017, in this special issue). The rendering of the museum as a liminal space consequently invites a re-imagined geography of learning and education.

A story that at this point may be further elaborated is the aspect of informal learning within formal education, because learning is like a free radical that may happen anywhere, anyhow, and with anything at any time and in line with, independent of, or even against someone's intentions (Bauer, 2016; Mulcahy, 2013). Such perspectives shed light on liminal or in-between spaces of learning, which have been studied in informal and outdoor settings, and the nexus of formal and informal learning during field trips (e.g. Daniels and Lorimer, 2012; Kraftl, 2013; Mills and Kraftl, 2014; Lorimer, 2003).

Dianne Mulcahy and Itta Bauer share an interest in actor–network theory, science and technology studies, and assemblage theories. In their research projects, both authors translate these theoretical approaches into an engaged practice of research that critically examines educational structures as well as processes of learning.

The main argument in Itta Bauer's paper illuminates the widely neglected grey zones and the fuzzy logic at the heart of the selection machinery for higher education. The canton of Zurich is used in an empirical case study that examines the specific practices of educational selection at the threshold between primary and secondary education. Conceptually, the paper draws on Michel Callon's “framing and overflowing” (Callon, 1998) and Lotfi Zadeh's “fuzzy logic” (Zadeh, 2015) to examine the processes and consequences of the central entrance examination introduced to the cantonal school system in 2007. Whereas academic papers and educational reports focusing on the issue of educational structures and selection processes tend to concentrate on “hard” facts, big issues, and adult voices, Itta Bauer manages to write into her paper some hitherto unheard voices of young people experiencing educational selection in Zurich.