This introduction to the special issue Young People and New Geographies of Learning and Education sets a theoretical frame for the collected papers focusing on the three themes: (1) movement and transitions, (2) spaces and identities, and (3) education and assemblages. This special issue adds an exciting collection of papers with diverse geographical foci that address the various challenges to youths, young people's geographies, and geographies of education.

This paper makes the case for greater consideration of the ways in which young people experience and negotiate transitions in their everyday lives and across the life course emotionally. Based on qualitative research with young people from the German city of Leipzig, the paper analyses the emotional fallout of interpersonal conflict, especially in families, and makes tentative suggestions for responding to young people's unbound emotional geographies in social and educational policy.

This paper uses the concepts of framing and overflowing (Callon, 1998) and fuzzy logic (Zadeh, 2015) to show the application and relevance of critically examining educational selection beyond the particular local context. It examines the empirical example of the central entrance examination procedure to grammar schools in the Canton of Zurich. The main argument illuminates the widely neglected grey zones and the fuzzy logic lying at the heart of the selection machinery for higher education.

Drawing on ethnographic research in a center for unaccompanied minor asylum seekers (UAM) in Switzerland we explored educational experiences of UAM. Our results show that attending internal schools should be time-bound as it can hinder the recognition of UAM’s previously acquired educational knowledge. Further, UAM attending mainstream schools experience feelings of not belonging, which seem to be caused by having the life experiences of a UAM and stereotypes about refugees and asylum seekers.

In this article, the concepts of liminality and liminal space are engaged in the context of museum learning and education. Deploying data collected from Museum Victoria, Australia, the spatial dynamics of student learning at the museum were mapped. Liminal spaces of learning were found to have a special salience. Jump starting the learner out of a comfortable state of mind and into a state of productive uncertainty, these spaces challenge how museum learning is conventionally understood.

The article analyzes unfoldings and enactments of narratives on a politically divisive past in educational spaces of two multi-ethnic settings – the Republic of Tatarstan and Bosnia and Herzegovina. We explore how the contested past is represented within official school curricula and how it unfolds in concrete school settings.

This paper addresses migrations taking place during the transition from higher education to the labour market. It analyses the reasons why graduates do not return to their rural home region after university, with a case study in Switzerland. The analysis of the motives reported by graduates indicates that migration decisions cannot be reduced to a single dimension (although job opportunities are central), are diverse (even within a homogeneous group) and depend on a variety of constraints.