Currently, in the Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, US, Fazal Rizvi has worked in a number of countries, including several senior university research and administrative posts in Australia. Diversity, it has been widely noted, cannot be read against a universal set of criteria, and that the moral claims surrounding diversity are contextually specific. Traditionally these claims have been nationally defined. In this paper, I will argue that this approach to thinking about diversity is no longer sufficient, and that while the national context still remains pertinent, in the era of globalization, it has become transformed by the emerging processes of transnationalism. Using a number of narratives, I will suggest that the multiple ways in which people now experience, interpret, negotiate and work with diversity are affected by factors that are deeply shaped by the emerging patterns of global mobility and interconnectivity. This recognition has major implications for educational research, requiring new conceptual resources that enable us to ‘read’ diversity as a product of complex interactions between national articulations and their re-constitution by transnational processes. More details: http://www.eera-ecer.eu/ecer/ecer2010/keynote-speakers/fazal-rizvi/ The recording of the keynote is here: http://www.eera-ecer.eu/ecer/ecer2010/channel-2/

1. Experiences of Diversity within the Context of an Emergent Transnationalism Fazal Rizvi University of Melbourne University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

2. Using personal narratives, this paper explores: … how personal, popular and policy representations of diversity are often aligned, but may also be disjunctural … how they have traditionally been interpreted in nation-centric terms … how new representations are now needed to take into account processes associated with an emergent transnationalism … and how this raises a number of new challenges for educational policy and research.

3. Personal Narrative 1 post-partition India… historical formations of difference

4. Personal Narrative 2 white Australia… differentiations based on language

5. Personal Narrative 3 postcolonial England… differentiations linked to migration

6. Personal Narrative 4 racialized America… post 9 -11 racialization of Muslims

7. … these narratives suggest that experiences of diversity cannot be read against a universal set of criteria, and that the moral and political claims surrounding diversity are: linked to specific personal circumstances contextually situated shaped by larger historical events articulated with/against state policies embedded within popular representations

8. However, these narratives assume the national space to be fundamental to any analysis of the experiences of cultural diversity This assumption can no longer be sustained. While the national space remains important, in the era of globalization, it has become radically reconfigured. The space within which diversity is now experienced has become ‘transnationalized’.

9. a comment on the notion of space: … .space does not represents a passive geometry, but is something that is continuously produced through socio-economic-political relations: it is thus relational and emergent. … better conceived as a product of cultural, social, political and economic interactions. It is socially experienced, negotiated and is constituted through both social relations and material conditions.

10. Transnational Space describes a condition in which … despite great distances and notwithstanding the presence of borders (and all the laws, regulations and national narratives they represent), certain kind of relationships have been globally intensified and now take place paradoxically in a planet-spanning yet common – however virtual – arena of activity. Vertovec (2009)

11. Vertovec (2010) has suggested that transnationalism: m ay be seen a kind of social formation spanning borders. ‘Dense and highly networks spanning vast spaces are transforming’, he suggests our social, cultural, economic and political relationships may be viewed as a type of consciousness, marked by multiple senses of identification, comprising of ever-changing representations represents a mode of cultural reproduction, associated with ‘a fluidity of constructed styles, social institutions and everyday practices’ involves new practices of capital formations that arguably involve globe-spanning structures or networks that have largely become disconnected from their national origins is a site for political engagement where cosmopolitan anti-nationalists often exist alongside reactionary ethno-nationalists within various diasporas, representing the dynamism of the relationships between different sites of political activity h as reconstructed localities, regrouping, as a result of the mobility of both people and ideas, the practices and meanings derived from multiple geographical and historical points of origin

17. What would educational policy and practice look like if we reversed this assumption and treated heterogeneity as a normal condition instead, and homogeneity as an exception?