Past, Present, Future: Life Mapping Intergenerational Educational Aspirations among British Pakistani and Bangladeshi Families
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This workshop explores life mapping as a participatory and intergenerational qualitative method for exploring educational aspirations, hope, and family narratives. Drawing on the Oxford Hope Project with British Pakistani and British Bangladeshi families, the workshop demonstrates how life maps were used to trace past, present, and future educational journeys across generations in precarious contexts. Developed through participatory family workshops at the University of Oxford, life mapping created a collaborative space for storytelling, reflection, and dialogue, enabling participants to represent experiences of migration, education, institutional encounters, aspiration, family experiences and structural inequality visually and narratively. The session foregrounds the methodological possibilities of life mapping for generating relational and multimodal data while challenging individualised understandings of aspiration. Workshop attendees will be able to engage directly with the method through an interactive life mapping activity, reflecting on their own educational and personal trajectories.
