Moving across borders: immigrant women’s encounters with globalization, the knowledge economy and lifelong learning

Migrating Professional Knowledge: Progressions, Regressions, and Dislocations

“…Deskilling is a term that initially referred to the skill degradation of workers with the introduction of new technologies into the labor process (Braverman, 1974). Deskilling, and the related terms deprofessionalization and underemployment have been taken up in current adult education debates to describe the experiences of immigrant professionals who end up working in their own fields but at much lower levels (and pay) than they are qualified, as well as in unrelated survival jobs characterized by low pay and irregular hours (Gibb & Hamdon, 2010;Guo, 2009Guo, , 2010Man, 2010;Mirchandani et al, 2008Mirchandani et al, , 2010Mojab, 2000;Ng, 1996;Sakamoto, Chin, & Young, 2010;Walsh, Brigham, & Wang, 2011). For immigrants, having a non-Canadian university degree does not necessarily translate into the same financial or professional opportunities of Canadian-educated graduates.…”

Transnational families, ICTs and mobile learning

“…This domesticized orientation also stems from neoliberal accounts of 'lifelong learners' as market-based citizens pursuing education as a means towards self-sufficiency for the knowledge-based society (Brine, 2008). These programme approaches 'ensure their compliance with the brave new world of flexible capitalism' by highlighting low-income mothers' socio-economic deficiencies rather than their resiliency and indigenous knowledge born of direct experience (Crowther, 2004, in Gibb & Hamdon, 2010). I will show that the migrant mothers in my study were financially strapped but ingenious in managing limited resources and time to sustain and build relations with family members from afar.…”

Exploring the role of migrants in transnational occupational learning processes in Estonia-Finland space

“…Immigration policies curtail the mobility of labour in transnational settings while educational and employment policies shape the mobility of human capital across national borders. Research (Andersson & Fejes, 2010;Gibb & Hamdon, 2010) has shown how national policies often protect the invisible borders of professional knowledge and migrants face downgrading of their occupational qualifications in the country of immigration.…”

“…(Andersson & Fejes, 2010;Man, 2004;Wagner & Childs, 2006) National policies of lifelong learning can, in practice, accentuate the deskilling of highly educated migrants if the processes of requalification required by the receiving country are complicated or non-existent (Andersson & Fejes, 2010;Guo, 2013a). For example, in Canada, female immigrants often decide to re-educate themselves because they cannot afford slow and expensive processes of recertification (Gibb & Hamdon, 2010;Ng & Shan, 2010). Even if systems for the recognition of migrants' prior learning have been created in some countries, as in Sweden, assessing the heterogeneous expertise of migrants is a challenging task involving power imbalances (Diedrich, 2013).…”