Miri Yemini is a tenured Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at Tel Aviv University.

At Tel Aviv Dr. Yemini teaches graduate and undergraduate modules in education, including Internationalisation in Education, Education and Globalisation, Entrepreneurship in Education and Project Management in Schools.

Dr. Yemini serves as a co-Chair of UNESCO chair for Technology and Internationalisation in Education. Recently (April 2018) she was awarded (with Prof. Dr. Nina Kolleck) by the Max Plank Foundation the Award for Research Cooperation and High Excellence in Science (ARCHES), to develop research in the field of school-NGO interactions. This year (2021) Dr. Yemini secured funding from Israeli Science Foundation (150,000 Euro) for her project on education trajectories of Global Middle Class families.

Increasing numbers of highly educated and skilled professionals are internationally mobile for work. Some are transferred by employers; some proactively seek out new positions in different countries.

The currently estimated size of this group (known as globally mobile professionals, ‘global expatriates’ or members of a global middle class) is 66.2 million, which is predicted to rise to 87.5 million by 2022.

The increasing number, but also growing cultural diversity of this group (originating from all parts of the world), and the extent to which/frequency they relocate is an important articulation of newer forms of transnationalism that encompass the movement of people and ideas, and changing economic and social relations.

This seminar aims to map out and theorise the everyday practices of these globally middle professional families and to consider how their presence in key cities around the world might be re-shaping political, social, economic and education structures.

In particular, we will discuss how these families experience mobility and what motivates these relocations; how families create a sense of identity while ‘on the move’; what short-term and longer term aspirations the professionals, their partners and their children have; what education and extra-curricular choices are made; how different cultural contexts are negotiated etc.

Critically, we will discuss how these middle class families work to reproduce and extend their privilege, and so engage in ‘class-making’ practices. Ultimately, this work offers a much-needed empirical basis to examine the theoretical proposition that there is now a ‘global’ middle class that is somehow different to nationally-located middle class groups.