Migration and educational projects online:A topic modelling approach of discussions on social media groups

This paper discusses the prevalence of topics relating to education in information exchanges on Facebook groups of Brazilians who live in – or wish to migrate to – Germany. Against the background of mediatisation theory, social networks and transnational education research, we conducted an explorative quantitative study based on a text-as-data approach. Con-cretely, we collected posts from 14 migrant groups and analysed them using topic model-ling. Our results reveal that vocational education and training (VET) are prevalent in these debates and topics associated with language learning and certification. We contend that latent ties (Haythornthwaite, 2002) on migrants’ social networks are relevant in migratory pathways involving education – regardless of educational level.