Search

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore representations of Aboriginal people, in particular children, in the Victorian government’s school reader The School Paper, from the end of the Second World War until its publication ceased in 1968. The author interrogates these representations within the framework of pedagogies of citizenship training and the development of national identity, to reveal the role Aboriginal people and their culture were accorded within the “imagined community” of Australian nationhood and its heritage and history. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on the rich material available in the Victorian Department of Education’s school reader, The School Paper, from 1946 to 1968 (when the publication ceased), and on the Department’s annual reports. These are read within the context of scholarship on race, education and citizenship formation in the post-war years. Findings – State government policies of assimilation following the Second World War tied in with pedagogies and curricula regarding citizenship and belonging, which became a key focus of education departments following the Second World War. The informal pedagogies of The School Paper’s representations of Aboriginal children and their families, the author argues, excluded Aboriginal communities from understandings of Australian nationhood, and from conceptions of the ideal Australian citizen-in-formation. Instead, representations of Aboriginal people relegated them to the outdoors in ways that racialised Australian spaces: Aboriginal cultures are portrayed as historical yet timeless, linked with the natural/native rather than civic/political environment. Originality/value – This paper builds on scholarship on the relationship between education, reading pedagogies and citizenship formation in Australia in the post-war years to develop our knowledge of how conceptions of the ideal Australian citizen of the future – that is, Australian students – were inherently racialised. It makes a new contribution to scholarship on the assimilation project in Australia, through revealing the relationship between government policies towards Aboriginal people and the racial and cultural qualities being taught in Australian schools.

Purpose In March 1969, Brisbane student and political activist Margaret Bailey was suspended from Inala High School – ostensibly for “undermining the authority” of her teacher – prompting claims of political suppression. Through a case study of the subsequent campaign for Bailey’s reinstatement, the purpose of this paper is to explain the emergence of the high school activist as a new political actor in the late 1960s. Design/methodology/approach The paper draws on newsletters and pamphlets produced by Brisbane activists, alongside articles from the left-wing and mainstream press, to reconstruct the key events of the campaign and trace the major arguments advanced by Bailey and her supporters. Findings Initiated by the high school activist group, Students in Dissent (SID), the campaign in support of Bailey lasted over two months, culminating in a “chain-in” staged by Bailey at the Queensland Treasury Building on 8 May. Linking together arguments about students’ rights, civil liberties and democratic government, the campaign reveals how high school activism was enabled not only by the broader climate of political dissent in the late 1960s, but by the increasing emphasis on secondary education as a right of modern citizenship in the preceding decades. Originality/value This is the first study of the campaign for Bailey’s reinstatement at Inala High School and one of the only analyses to date of the political mobilisation of high school students in Australia during the late 1960s. The case study of the Bailey campaign underlines that secondary school students were important players in the political contests of the late 1960s and, if only for brief periods, were able to command the attention of education officials, the media and leading politicians. It represents an important historical precedent for contemporary high school activism, including the global School Strike 4 Climate movement.

Toponyms, along with other urban symbols, were used as a tool of control over space in many African countries during the colonial period. This strategy was epitomized by the British, who applied it in Nairobi and other parts of Kenya from the late 1800s. This paper shows that toponymy in colonial Nairobi was an imposition of British political references, urban nomenclature, as well as the replication of a British spatial idyll on the urban landscape of Nairobi. In early colonial Nairobi, the population was mainly composed of three main groups: British, Asians, and Africans. Although the Africans formed the bulk of the population, they were the least represented, socially, economically and politically. Ironically, he British, who were the least in population held the political and economic power, and they applied it vigorously in shaping the identity of the city. The Asians were neither as powerful as the British, nor were they considered to be at the low level of the native Africans. This was the deliberate hierarchical structure that was instituted by the colonial government, where the level of urban citizenship depended on ethnic affiliation. Consequently, this structure was reflected in the toponymy and spatial organization of the newly founded city with little consideration to its pre-colonial status. Streets, buildings and other spaces such as parks were predominantly named after the British monarchy, colonial administrators, settler farmers, and businessmen, as well as prominent Asian personalities. In this paper, historical references such as maps, letter correspondences, monographs, and newspaper archives have been used as evidence to prove that toponyms in colonial Nairobi were the spatial signifiers that reflected the political, ideological and ethnic hierarchies and inequalities of the time.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore military service-linked economic and social governing initiatives in early twentieth-century Sweden, and thereby offer a broadened understanding of educational institutions as governing arenas. Design/methodology/approach Using the term “governing” to describe and analyse various calculated techniques of the state – and/or affiliated governing actors – to influence and direct the behaviour of conscripts in order to deal with particular economic and/or social problems, the author ask what kind of economic and social problems policymakers and social commentators of education were looking to deal with, why military service was considered a suitable means and/or setting for doing so, and what governing techniques they proposed be used. The author furthermore take in consideration the intimate links between citizenship, gender, and military service and argue that the governing initiatives analysed enables us to understand these links in partly new and a more concrete way. Findings The study shows that there were numerous ideas and requests amongst policymakers and social commentators of education on making use of the nation’s conscription scheme for non-military purposes as it provided the nation with a unique opportunity to reach and influence entire generations of men on the threshold of adulthood. Proposals included, e.g., the use of various forms of instruction in assorted subjects, facilitation of base libraries and an extension of the period of military service, in order to deal with economic and social problems such as, e.g., mass unemployment, alcohol abuse, elementary education deficiencies, and uneducated voters, as well as shortages of skilled personnel in particular branches of great importance for the nation’s economy. Originality/value While there is a sizable and growing body of research on governing initiatives in non-military educational settings, proposed and implemented to solve various economic and social problems in society, scholars in Sweden and elsewhere have largely overlooked the use and role of military service in such undertakings. This paper seeks to redress the balance and thereby offers a broadened understanding of educational institutions as governing arenas.

After the Civil War (1861–1865), the United States faced a problem of “reconstruction” similar to that confronted by other nations at the time and familiar to the US since at least the Mexican–American War (1846–1848). The problem was one of territorial and political (re)integration: how to take territories that had only recently been operating under “foreign” governance and integrate them into an expanded nation-state on common structural terms. This paper considers the significance of education in that process of state (re)formation after the Civil War, with particular attention to its role in federal territories of the US West. Specifically, this paper analyses the role that education-based restrictions on citizenship, voting rights and office-holding played in constructing formal state power in the cases of five western territories: Hawaii, Indian Territory, Oklahoma, Arizona and New Mexico. A focus on the significance of education in these cases both advances and challenges literature on the ...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to canvass debates arising from encounters between architectural and educational history and to introduce a themed section of four papers exploring aspects of the history of school design and the spatial arrangements of Australian schooling across the twentieth century. Design/methodology/approach – This is an interpretive introductory essay that characterizes trends in historical and sociological studies of school space and materialities, and synthesizes the arguments and contributions of the four companion papers. Findings – A case is made for greater exchange among educational, architectural and social historians and key insights and findings from the four papers concerning school space, design and educational ideas are summarized. Themes of community, citizenship and progressive education are highlighted. Originality/value – The value of the paper lies in introducing the context and scholarly debates framing a collection of four papers that seek to open up new avenues for investigating the history of modern schooling through studying intersections between school space and design and educational purposes and aspiration.

Transformed by Russian colonial expansion in the late 1890s, the Chinese territory of Manchuria turned from a remote frontier into a locus of global metropolises in the making, where a complex money economy comprising of multiple currencies took root. Mirroring localized contestations and global rivalries, Russian proposals first advocated supporting a Chinese currency to “squeeze out” Mexican and “English” dollars, but settled on creating a ruble for Manchuria, to inscribe Manchuria as Russian. As depicted by Georg Simmel contemplating the European metropolis in the 1900s, money was “colorless,” an instrument of equivalence without intrinsic quality, or “color,” that homogenized qualitative differences. In the colonial and multiethnic setting of Manchuria, however, money took the form of competing currencies that by the 1920s included various Russian rubles, the Soviet chervonets, a Japanese yen, and a variety of Chinese dollars. In this form, money in Manchuria was “colored”–by the qualitative differences associated with supposed national character and perceptions of strengths and weaknesses that found expression in the way currency exchange rate became an everyday concern for the local urban population. This paper traces Russian and Chinese efforts to render their currencies “colorless” in the sense understood by Simmel, with colorlessness meaning uniformity and absence of qualities that would hinder the currencies' ideal function. The paper explores how these efforts–such as Soviet currency “unification” policies in the Russian Far East after 1922–worked to erase the diversity of the region with respect to monetary practices. Reading these efforts at achieving uniformity and eliminating “color” in another light, my paper suggests that the experience of living with competing currencies in the Manchurian urban environment also had a socializing effect that worked toward acceptance of difference and diversity, reflected in the emphasis on a currency's convertibility to another, rather than on any one currency's unique presence. This paper thus also investigates the ways competing currencies in Manchuria might have shaped Russian and Chinese conceptions of citizenship in the direction of disregarding the “color”–the supposed intrinsic qualities marking their differences–of the diverse ethnicities of the region's population, in favor of a vision of functional equivalence, equality, and equal participation indicated by the principle of currency circulation.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine expert ideas about education for citizenship in 1930s Australia. Drawing on a larger study of adolescence and schooling during the middle decades of the twentieth century, the paper explores the role of international networks and US philanthropy in fostering the spread of new psychological and curriculum ideas that shaped citizenship education, and broader educational changes during the interwar period. A second purpose is to provide historical perspectives on contemporary concerns about the role of schooling in addressing social values and student wellbeing. Design/methodology/approach – The discussion is informed by approaches drawn from Foucauldian genealogy and historical studies of transnationalism. It examines constructions of the good and problem student and the networks of international educational expertise as forms of “travelling ideas”. These transnational exchanges are explored through a close analysis of a defining moment in Australian educational history, the 1937 conference of the New Education Fellowship. Findings – The analysis reveals the ways in which psychological understandings and curriculum reforms shaped education for citizenship in the 1930s and identify in particular the emergent role of psychology in defining what it meant to be a good student and a good future citizen. The paper further finds that Australian education during the interwar years was more cosmopolitan and engaged in international discussions about citizenship and schooling than is usually remembered in the present. Elaborating this is important for building transnational histories of knowledge exchange in Australian education. Originality/value – The paper shows the value of a relational analysis of school curriculum and psychological understandings for more fully grasping the different dimensions of education for citizenship both in the interwar years and now. It offers fresh perspectives on contemporary educational debates about globalisation and youth identities, as played out in current concerns about social values and schooling.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical overview of the field of knowledge transfer and educational change and a discussion of the issues raised in the six papers in this special edition. Design/methodology/approach – A theoretical analysis of the field of knowledge transfer. Findings – The six papers consider issues such as the interplay of ideas between British and Indian educationalists, post-war debates over literacy standards, the use of curriculum materials for the process of citizen formation, the influence of international exchanges in the education of adolescents for citizenship, Vigotsky and the transfer of knowledge across time, space, culture, disciplines and networks, and the way constructions of Chinese identity within history books were shaped by knowledge processes that transcended nation states. Originality/value – This special issue of the History of Education Review engages with new approaches that have become available to historians in the past decade illustrating how they might be applied for the first time to key issues in the history of education across colonial and state borders. It addresses questions about the movement of knowledge across national and cultural boundaries, and examines key problems facing educators in a range of colonial and postcolonial contexts.

This paper outlines the ways in which the conception of social integration and its practical realization have developed over time in Australia, and the various pathways that models of integration have followed. It makes a distinction between the approaches to inclusion of the indigenous population, the Australian Aborigines in broader Australian social life and social institutions, and those dealing with populations of incoming migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers. Although there are similarities in the models of integration mobilized in both arenas, the differences and interactions are also significant and characteristic of what is specific about settler-colonial societies. The central models in both fields are assimilation, integration and multiculturalism, and the paper will sketch briefly how each model has operated both in theory and in practice, how they have succeeded and interacted with each other, how they have intersected with other types of concerns, such as citizenship, civilization ...

This paper argues that the first phase of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945 saw a significant change in the relationship between state and society in China, leading to a greater use of techniques of classification of the citizenry for purposes of welfare provision and mobilization through propaganda, methods until recently more associated with the Communists than with their Nationalist rivals. The paper draws on materials from Sichuan, the key province for wartime resistance, showing that the use of identity cards and welfare provision regulations were part of a process of integrating refugees from occupied China into the wider wartime society, and that propaganda campaigns were deployed to persuade the local indigenous population to support wartime state initiatives. Although Nationalist efforts to mobilize the population in wartime were flawed and partial, they marked a significant change in the conception of Chinese citizenship.

This paper explores ways in which intercultural citizenship can be investigated by students through the use of both archival material and extracted information from the daily press, now widely accessible in databases, and how to convey the significance of transcultural exchange and historical events to students of English language and cultures at the university level. The theoretical framework employed is that of the relationship between language and identity, in which international events are contextualized through their effects on the daily lives of citizens. Additionally, the cultural, economic and political exchanges between the Iberian Peninsula and the United Kingdom described in these documents prove instrumental in the formation of present-day students’ identity, as well as raising their critical intercultural awareness., Este trabajo muestra un ejemplo de investigación del concepto y praxis de la ciudadanía intercultural mediante el uso de documentación archivística e informaciones de prensa procedentes de bases de datos accesibles para los docentes del siglo XXI, con el fin de que el estudiantado universitario de lengua y culturas inglesas pueda conocer intercambios transculturales y acontecimientos históricos. El marco teórico utilizado es la relación entre la lengua y la identidad mediante la que estos eventos aparecen contextualizados en la vida diaria de la ciudadanía. Además, los intercambios culturales, económicos y políticos presentes en los documentos citados resultan de gran utilidad para incrementar la conciencia crítica intercultural del estudiantado actual, así como la formación de su propia identidad., This paper has been possible thanks to the research networks (R 2014/043) funded by the Galician Government (Xunta de Galicia) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), and FFI2015-71025-REDT, and to the research projects FFI2012-35872, and FEM2015-66937-P funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad). These grants are hereby gratefully acknowledged.

Italy is host to a growing population of second-generation immigrants, children of immigrants born and raised in Italy. The current citizenship regime privileges Italian descent and makes naturalization very difficult, even for those born on Italian soil. This relegates a large population of second-generation immigrants to a marginal position, excluded from political, educational and labor integration upon their eighteenth birthday because of their citizenship status. Using data from group interviews, this paper investigates Italians' willingness to grant citizenship to second-generation immigrants. Three major themes emerged: how Italians define citizenship, the idea of conditional citizenship, and the significance of race in imagining the future of Italian society. This paper seeks to understand the dynamics underlying the debate about citizenship and gauge support for reforms to the current citizenship regime.

This paper examines the development of citizenship in Austria-Hungary between 1867 and the 1920s. At the beginning, the paper analyses the reform of citizenship laws in both Austria and Hungary after the Settlement of 1867. Whilst the Austrian citizenship law maintained legal traditions stretching back into the first half of the nineteenth century, the new Hungarian citizenship law of 1878 emulated the laws in effect in Wilhelmine Germany. The basis of Hungarian citizenship law was, however, much broader than German law, in order to allow for the effective integration of the non-Magyar population. An evaluation of applications for Austrian naturalisation illustrates the remarkable capacity of Austrian citizenship law to integrate and to uphold a concept of nationality independent from ethnicity, religious denomination, class or gender. Only during, and above all after, the First World War did the inclusive practice of the Cisleithanian bureaucracy give way to the more exclusive policy of the new German-Au...

This article shows how the legitimization of the territory of a national community was going through a territorial and citizen‐oriented pedagogy in which geography and history texts contributed to the elaboration of certain social representations that were part of the new Latin American nations’ development process. Therefore, this paper reviews social representations of territory and citizenship that appeared in some geography and history school handbooks used by nineteenth‐century Colombian Caribbean region schools. These texts played an important role in the education of Colombian citizens. The paper is divided into two parts: first, it focuses on the representation of the national territory to which former republican governments attached great value promoting a number of geographical studies and the exploration of the country by foreign travelers and geographers who produced various works that influenced greatly geography handbooks used in the school. The second part refers to the representation of a ...

The 1848, emancipation of slaves in the French West Indies also granted them French citizenship on the grounds of one of the three fundamental principles of the French Republic, the equality of men. This same principal also had an important impact on gender relations, for it attributed to women a subordinate legal status. Under the new legislation forged at the heart of the French state, women became ‘minors.’ They were for example, excluded from one of the primary rights of a citizen, that of the vote. The spirit of the law thus reconstituted a state of civil opposition based not a judicial status (slave versus free) but on gender. This paper examines the impact of such changes on social relations, the extent to which they relegated women to the periphery of social movements and established a new social hierarchy stigmatizing the newly freed population. †This paper was translated by Gwyn Campbell.

Mexico's transition from a colonial society to an independent nation was extremely difficult and civil war seemed to threaten at every turn during the first half of the nineteenth century. Independence required the creation of a new republican order to replace the colonial system of corporate identities and racial domination. The creation of a new liberal order based on individual citizenship was a contested process where competing political actors sought to preserve colonial privileges even as they used the new constitutional system to their advantage. The indigenous communities, the majority of the population at independence, posed a challenge to the new society of citizens. The objective of this paper is to explore the fate of indigenous communities under the new system and how Indians manipulated it in order to survive. The following pages discuss how independence affected villagers by first describing what the change to a new liberal order meant for local town governments. Then using case studies from the gulf region of Mexico, the paper will draw connections between indigenous village politics and the pronunciamientos that frequently destabilized the national government. Pronunciamientos in the provinces had a profound effect that over time tended to create more opportunities for discontented villagers to enter politics. Finally, the paper will discuss how these political divisions played out in the series of rebellions of the late 1840s known as “caste war of the Huasteca.”

This paper examines two questions. The first is what it would mean for schools to be communities. This question is pursued by examining four metaphors for community: families, congregations, guilds, and democratic polities. Three models of school communities are then sketched. The second question is whether schools that are communities are inherently illiberal. The paper distinguishes between a liberal interpretation of schools as communities, where schools are viewed as limited-purpose free associations, and a communitarian interpretation where community and polity are not adequately distinguished. I argue that, within a framework of liberal pluralism, schools can be communities without being illiberal.

The dramatic political upheavals and transformations that have occurred throughout the world during the 1990s have served to refocus international attention on theories of citizenship and democracy. Feminist theorists have explored alternative notions of radical and substantive democracy, suggesting that extending democratization depends upon the creation of metaphorical and material spaces for women's effective participation. Related to this is a growing interest among political and feminist geographers in the scales and spaces of citizenship. Drawing upon these theoretical contexts, this paper explores how transformations in South Africa present opportunities for reworking understandings of democratization and citizenship. The paper places gender and citizenship in South Africa within international feminist debates, and explores the sequence of events through which gender issues came to prominence in South Africa during the transition to democracy. The ways in which political rights are mediated by informal structures, and the effects of this on women, are analysed. The paper concludes by discussing the ways in which the construction and contestation of citizenship in South Africa might inform broader international feminist debates.

Dubai is a unique location to interrogate the dynamics of multicultural politics, interracial relations and belonging; with 90 per cent of its population made up of resident foreigners across 150 nationalities. The city-state is typical of the Islamic Gulf states in that it draws labour migrants not with the promise of eventual citizenship and access to the state's resources, but with the trappings of a tax-free lifestyle and opportunity for accelerated capital accumulation. In the absence of government policy that creates a sense of inclusion or community, the emirate is a highly stratified space – divided along lines of gender, race, nationality and class. It has been popularly understood as an uncaring place. By contrast, this paper will show that there exist strong informal networks of care within the emirate. These networks cross, but also rely on, ethnic, national, gender and class categories. Based on fieldwork conducted in the city-state in 2008, this paper discusses working-class solidarities, th...

Over the last decades, Sweden has liberalized its citizenship policy by reducing the required number of years of residency to 5 years for foreign citizens and only 2 years for Nordic citizens. Dual citizenship has been allowed since 2001. During the same period, immigration patterns by country of birth changed substantially, with an increasing number of immigrants arriving from non-western countries. Furthermore, immigrants were settling in larger cities as opposed to smaller towns as was the case before. Interestingly, the employment integration of immigrants has declined gradually, and in 2006, the employment rate for foreign-born individuals is substantially lower compared with the native-born. The aim of this paper is to explore the link between citizenship and employment probabilities for immigrants in Sweden, controlling for a range of demographic, human capital, and municipal characteristics such as city and co-ethnic population size. The information we employ for this analysis consists of register data on the whole population of Sweden held by Statistics Sweden for the year 2006. The basic register, STATIV, includes demographic, socio-economic, and immigrant specific information. In this paper, we used instrumental variable regression to examine the “clean” impact of citizenship acquisition and the size of the co-immigrant population on the probability of being employed. In contrast to Scott (2008), we find that citizenship acquisition has a positive impact for a number of immigrant groups. This is particularly the case for non-EU/non-North American immigrants. In terms of intake class, refugees appear to experience substantial gains from citizenship acquisition (this is not, however, the case for immigrants entering as family class). We find that the impact of the co-immigrant population is particularly important for immigrants from Asia and Africa. These are also the countries that have the lowest employment rate.

In this paper, I examine Hong Kong’s identity and citizenship through the Chinese landscape painting, Mountain Palace, by Dong Yuan. Specifically, I ask: how can a reading of Mountain Palace using ...

This paper explores the reshaping of higher education within a neoliberal paradigm of economic development and the implications for universities and colleges as sites of citizenship formation. The work of Torfing, in particular his critical integration of the work of Laclau, Mouffle, and Zizek, provides the theoretical framework for the analysis. After revisiting the relation between higher education and the development of the welfare state, the paper examines the restructuration that is taking place in curriculum, pedagogical method, governance, and administration. Constructivism, dominant paradigm in educational circles, the author argues, supports the neoliberal ideology within the global economy. The implications of the changes are also evident in the deregulation of fees and the sanctioning of private degree-granting institutions. The paper not only examines how the institutions are contributing to the expansion of the hegemonic discourse but also refers to emancipatory movements emerging from the areas of health, environment, social equity, and motivated by democratic concerns. Higher education has a role in political resistance.

This paper examines the 1941 pamphlet “Down with Starvation-Wages!,” written by Local 313 striking sharecroppers in Southeast Missouri, as it both anticipates and places into deep historical tension theories of normativity that would come to be associated with continental European critique after World War Two. The pamphlet's contents are both a local response to and critical theory of New Deal struggles over the meaning and bureaucratic administration of rehabilitation. I first examine the schematic history of federal Rehabilitation programs as they emerged in the biomedical context of the First World War and were then transformed in the agricultural-economic context of the New Deal era. Across these contexts, I demonstrate that their main discursive and procedural function was the cultivation of their white beneficiaries as economic and political self-sovereigns. I then argue that the brief attempt to extend this Agricultural Adjustment Administration-administered form of Rural Rehabilitation programming, ostensibly an index of citizenship, to 1939 striking sharecroppers constituted one attempt to dull the normative force of an organized population, which had long been treated as surplus. I outline the relocation of remaining protesters to the farming cooperative of Cropperville by the St. Louis Committee for the Rehabilitation of Sharecroppers as an intermediary mode of social management that aimed to prevent organized sharecropper protest without extending the promise of full citizenship. The Local's 1941 subsequent “starvation-wage” is thus a relational theory of racist exploitation that allowed the state of starvation to emerge among black persons. In its maintenance of various orders of black persons’ virtual value as perpetually unrealized, its economy is made to run through cycles of starvation, bondage, and debt; as well as nutrition, rehabilitation, and repair. The Local's subsequent endorsement of the 1941 strike and of coalitional organizing with white sharecroppers thus instrumentalizes the very uneven racist distribution of history and life chances by the starvation-wage as a political resource in elaborating potentially novel arrangements of life.

The article examines a key attribute of Russian national identity—national pride—as it is reflected in mass consciousness. To trace the dynamics of multiple facets of national pride and related phenomena from 1996 to 2015, we use data from five surveys. The results demonstrate a substantial growth in Russian national pride in specific country achievements and general pride in Russian citizenship over the last 20 years. This change is the result of the population’s and state’s need for positive social identity as well as from both real and imagined progress in the Russian economy and political influence, and it started long before the Crimea mobilization and Olympics of 2014. The structural difference in pride in various achievements persisted for the 20 years examined here, but became less distinct. Across the years examined here, Russian national pride has become more strongly related to belief in the superiority of the country and is therefore increasingly competitive.

How did the abolition of slavery influence the relations between urban centres and rural areas? How did “new” French citizens experience access to the urban environment? Based on the archives of the correctional courts, this article focuses on how race and citizenship determined the accessibility of French colonial urban spaces and institutions after 1848. The abolition of slavery in the French Antilles on 27 April 1848 led to a modification of the legal and judicial systems: the changing legal status of former slaves gave them new opportunities to move around the colonies, at least on paper. In theory, after 1848, everyone should have had freedom of social and spatial mobility and access to the urban centres and their institutions; what happened in practice, however, still needs to be researched. This article shows that the abolition exacerbated two dynamics already at play since the beginning of the nineteenth century: the control of the population and the attraction of the urban environment for the elite. The plantation system in the mid-nineteenth century was suffering both economically and politically: the newly acquired freedom and possible migration of former slaves to the towns (Saint-Pierre and Fort-de-France in Martinique, Pointe-à-Pitre and Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe) threatened to destabilize the system of private justice as well as the economic apparatus. To counteract these legal changes, vagrancy laws were implemented to restrict citizens’ mobility while, at the same time, the white elite's discourse on urban spaces changed from them being seen as a hotbed for revolutionary ideas to representing a safe environment to which access needed to be restricted.

Before the civil war broke out in Syria following the uprising in March 2011, Turkey and Syria had a rather good relationship permitting an easy crossing of the border and letting thousands of Syrian nationals to pursue their studies at the northern neighbor. With the deepening of the fights in Syria, the number of refugees flowing into the Turkish Republic was growing, and according to recent statistics, an estimated 3 million Syrian asylum seekers reside on Turkish soil. Some of them live in refugee camps, some of them with family members holding Turkish citizenship, and an increasing number of them made Turkey their home thanks to scholarship programs provided by the Turkish government, universities or civil society organizations. In our present paper, we would like to analyze the usage of the method of secondary data analysis the current situation of Syrian refugee students studying at Turkish universities. We would first concentrate on the statistical aspect of the issue using the tables provided by the Turkish pedagogical agent called Measurement, Selection and Placement Center (OSYM) and the Higher Education Board (YOK), the total number of students and the academic and social background of those benefitting from the above opportunities. Later on, we project to highlight the main reason why a refugee can find Turkey an ideal place for his or her academic career and research, what their rights and duties and how can they contribute to the development of Turkey and the refugee community int hat country. The story of refugee students in Turkey can prove how survivals of a disastrous tragedy can have a benefit from a quality education in order to be reintegrated into society and promote peace and understanding. How to cite: Bariscil, A. (2017). An Emergency Academic Support - Syrian Refugee Students in the Turkish Higher Education. Revista Romaneasca pentru Educatie Multidimensionala , 9(1), 39-49. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18662/rrem/2017.0901.03