Cultural bridges and reimagined geographies: International students navigating and engaging the complex cultures present in the academic world of Taiwan

With the growth of higher education literature featuring emerging study destinations and new demographics of international students facilitated by government scholarships, scholars must address how students desire and imagine culture and diversity in study-abroad experiences and what impact these experiences have on cultural imaginaries and future aspirations. This article introduces a case study in Taiwan (officially Republic of China), an emerging study destination that attracts international students through government scholarships and accentuates powerful cultural discourses based on both Chineseness and Western-style development. Through qualitative interviews and analysis based on ‘capacity to aspire’, it examines students’ desires and perceptions of ‘culture’, their susceptibility to institutional cultural narratives, and ability to enact individual agency and reimagine culture and geography independently from ‘host images’ portrayed by institutions. A key finding is how students develop aspirations for their classmates’ home countries based on new perceptions of culture and place, revealing a new dimension of South–South student mobilities.

PARTICIPATION TO EMPOWER CHILDREN AND STRENGTHEN THE COMMUNITY

In a pandemic, children’s participation is even more important than before. This paper presents the first stage of an exploratory study for my PhD research in Pedagogy beginning in January 2021 in Milan. The participants are 19 pupils of class 4B (primary school), their parents and the teachers who joined energies to reproject a square, in order to transform it into a welcoming space for the entire community. In Italy, public speeches did not mention children who could not finally use public spaces for months as they were identified as the “plague spreaders”. The project revisits this perspective by considering children as potential actors of the transformation. Only if adults set the conditions for a change, children, their needs and their imagination could become agents for that change and centre of the community. The project name is Piazziamoci (Let’s place ourselves here) to signify the conscious act of taking a place together. After a theoretical framework of the study within Student Voice, I describe the generative circumstances, the context and the first steps of the project. The children explored the square, interviewed the inhabitants, shared information and dreams with their classmates coming up with proposals to present to City Council. This first phase aimed to set the basis of my investigation on the participants self-awareness as people and members of the community; it also focuses on the perception of the square as a common good. To this purpose, this work introduces concepts as the capacity to aspire (Appadurai, 2004), imagination and creativity (Vygotsky, 1930/2004), interdependence (Butler, 2020), and, therefore, a political and educational interpretation of the project.

An Analysis of Urban Initiatives in Cairo: Locality, Everyday Politics and Relational Space in Cairo’s Unplanned Neighbourhoods

This article focuses on urban activism and social movements that emerged in Cairo between 2011 and 2014 and argues that in unplanned areas these initiatives shape patterns of agency and social encounter. This contribution therefore investigates the transformative potential activated by the encounters between women of different social background in a small association (ǧamā‘iyya) in the unplanned area of Ezbet al-Haggana, in the north-east periphery of Cairo. Through analytical categories such as the “everyday politics”, “informality”, “relational space” and “capacity to aspire”, the article analyses how the everyday interactions, even within apparently non-politicized actions, reveal features of social change and mobility. The materials presented have been collected during a three-year research period conducted between 2012 and 2015. The fieldwork included 10 semi-structured interviews with local activists and institutional actors as well as an ethnographic account, which will be reported in the text.

Aspiration Formation and Ecological Shocks in Rural Kenya

Aspirations have been shown to affect households’ decisions around productive investments, but little work explores how aspirations are formed or eroded, especially in the face of ecological threats. While ecological threats may erode social and economic capital, there is no consensus on their effect on internal factors such as aspirations. We use the spread of three invasive species as our measure of ecological stressors and shocks. While all three reduce productivity, two of these invasives are slow-moving, and one fast: Parthenium, Prosopis, and Fall Armyworm (FAW), respectively. We ask how exposure to these stressors and shocks affect aspirations about income, assets, livestock, social status, and education as well as an aspirations index. Employing primary data on 530 smallholder households in northern Kenya, we find that ecological stressors, specifically, Prosopis, are correlated with lower aspirations. The effect of ecological stressors on wealth is the mechanism through which this happens. Our findings offer suggestive evidence of the concept of the ‘capacity to aspire’ which hinges on one’s material endowment and relates to the future-oriented logic of development.

Collective Capacity to Aspire? Aspirations and Livelihood Strategies in the Zambezi Region, Namibia

This paper investigates rural development from a micro-level standpoint, focusing on individual and collective aspirations. We aim to deepen understanding of how a person’s socio-economic environment shapes their aspirations and simultaneously how aspirations contribute to future-oriented actions. In combining concepts of sustainable livelihoods and aspirations with a context of ‘ordinary uncertainties’ (Pine, Ordinary uncertainties: remembering the past and imagining the future at times of rupture and mobility. In: Paper presented at the conference “Rurality and Future-Making. Comparative Perspectives from Europe, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean”, 22–24 May, Cologne, Germany, 2019), we discuss the role of individual and collective aspirations in developing livelihood strategies. Drawing on qualitative data from field research in Namibia’s Zambezi region, we identify crucial factors that influence aspirations: multiple uncertainties, experiences, and role models. Access to diverse experiences and social exchange shapes future-oriented aspirations, and therefore needs to be included in rural development strategies that account for diversity within communities.

ASPIRATIONS FAILURE, DISADVANTAGE TRAPS AND INCLUSIVE REGIONAL POLICY

This paper examines the implications for regional policy of new research on the role played by a failure in the ‘capacity to aspire’ [Appadurai, A. (2004), ‘The capacity to aspire’, in Rao, V. and Walton, M. (eds), Culture and Public Action, Washington, DC: World Bank.] in perpetuating disadvantage traps. After a brief review of the magnitude of the challenge that regional policy needs to confront, it provides a summary of the theoretical and empirical literature on poverty and aspirations failure (and the associated loss of agency, beliefs and self-efficacy). The key implication for the design of an inclusive regional policy is that it needs to address simultaneously the sources of external constraints (such as the availability of resources or adequate infrastructure) and mitigate the aspirations failure inherently linked to persistent disadvantage.