Moving beyond sedentarism: conceptual and empirical developments

Abstract

Sedentarism is the binary in the Western, industrialized world that constructs fixed residence as the sociocultural norm from which itinerancy and mobility deviate and are thereby positioned as pathologies. Sedentarism has a long history of marginalization of mobile individuals and communities, and has been complicit with the anti-pastoralist policies of state development in Asia and Africa as well as with race-based discrimination against Gypsy Travelers and Roma in Europe. In the domain of formal education, sedentarism has likewise found allies in an industrialized approach to schooling provision that assumes that learners live in fixed locations. This approach creates difficulties for communities whose occupations require families to be temporary visitors to particular locations. As a result, mobile learners tend to be marginalized and families feel obliged to choose between their way of life and their children’s educational access. This chapter explores several dimensions of moving beyond this disabling sedentarism. Drawing on examples from our respective studies of Australian show people and seasonal workers, we argue that sedentarism’s resilience as a marginalizing binary will be disrupted only by the effective combination of conceptual and empirical developments that afford new understandings of residence, mobility, and educational provision. More broadly, the chapter considers implications of this argument for the education of non-mobile as well as mobile learners.