Elizer Jay de los Reyes was born and raised in a farming village in Northern Philippines and he was the first in his family to study abroad. He is a PhD candidate at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne in Australia. Drawing upon his rural and transnational biography, Jay’s interest focuses on imagination, futures, and mobilities. His thesis explores the ways in which young people in the villages of a farming town, in the Cordillera Mountains, Northern Philippines, are imagining and forging their futures in the context of banal transnational mobilities of labour, finance, and ideas. He was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign where he finished an MA in educational policy studies and he is currently a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst scholar at the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology, Germany (Winter 2017).
