On Being Education Nomads in Contemporary Mongolia

The intersectionality between herding and education transforms children of Mongolian herders into education nomads who engage in the negotiation between contemporary and traditional knowledge production processes through their mobility in the rural-urban continuum, and participation in the herder and educated urbanite communities of practice.

How these communities cultivate learners' relationships to their socioecology inform education nomads’ subjectivity and aspirations which in turn shape the future of Mongolia’s pastoralism.

This presentation focuses on the impacts of formal schooling on education nomads which go beyond the criteria established by the official curricula and measured by the formal testing systems that predominantly occupy the concerns of educational development.

In fact, education nomads’ central preoccupation in the formal schooling experience is their participation in the practice of being educated and being urban subjects, which are characteristics of the educated urbanite community of practice whose members engage in long-term participation in formal schooling and living in urban places. The practice of being educated urbanites is embedded in different forms of social organizations of knowledges that govern education nomads’ everyday life in urban centers.

In the presentation, Kim Chi Tran unravel schools and dormitories as programmes of power that use different technologies of disciplinary and bio powers to condition education nomads to urban institutional logics of social relations, temporality and spatiality which prioritize the optimization of urban institutions’ operations over the nurturing of their members’ relationships to the socioecology in which they are embedded.