Conceptualizing Bordering through Educational Transitions: Three Questions for Linguistic Ethnography

This paper reflects on bordering as a theoretical lens in linguistic ethnography and is based on my experience investigating the educational transitions of two multilingual families in South Tyrol, Italy. I organize the article around three questions that have been guiding my reflections: why educational transitions offer productive sites for studying bordering; what family- and childcentered perspectives may make visible; and what counts as ethnographic evidence of bordering. First, approaching transitions as ongoing, relational processes made it possible to examine how institutional categories and expectations enter educational decisions before and beyond school entry. Second, following families, primarily through relationships with mothers, directed my attention to care practices and everyday settings, while requiring reflection on assumptions about family membership. At the same time, attention to children’s own perspectives meant allowing their activities and interests to guide inquiry, without presuming that they interpret school expectations and social categories as adults do. Starting from these premises, it became possible to connect schooling with wider inequalities involving housing, welfare, employment and gender. Lastly, drawing on Türk-Yiğitalp (2026), territorial thinking, moralization, and racialization provided analytical dimensions for examining how language became salient in bordering processes within educational transitions.