International Students and Transnational Spaces

Transcription

1 International Students and Transnational Spaces Fazal Rizvi University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

2 International student mobility has always been a part of higher education, but in ways that have varied. COLONIAL FORMATIONS DEVELOPMENATAL IDEOLOGIES NEO-LIBERAL MARKETS

3 The space within which international student mobility now takes place has become a transnational one, characterized by multiple ties and interactions linking people and institutions across the borders of nation-states In this talk, I want to argue that the contemporary transnational formations have major implications for thinking about international student mobility, not least because the challenges they pose for international students as they attempt to negotaiate their research interests and career trajectories In presenting my arguments, I draw both on my own experiences as an academic who has advised, over the past twenty years, a large number of international students in Australian and American universities and on the data I have collected over the past decade from reserch projects that have examined issues of global mobility of students and the internationalization of higher education.

4 The idea of transnational spaces has emerged in recent years as a powerful new conceptual optic with which to understand how the world is now constituted by cross-border relationships, patterns of economic, political and cultural relations and complex affiliations and social formations that span the world. a condition in which, despite great distances and notwithstanding the presence of international borders (and all the laws, regulations and national narratives they represent), certain kind of relationships have been globally intensified and now take place paradoxically in a planet-spanning yet common however virtual arena of activity. (Vertovec 2009: 5) In this sense, the idea of transnationalism suggests systems of ties, interactions, exchanges and mobilities that spread across and span the world. However, it also refers to a mode of consciousness a way of thinking about ourselves as belonging to the world as a whole (Cohen and Kennedy 2007: 58).

5 Six takes on transnationalism 1.. Dense and highly networks spanning vast spaces are transforming many kinds of social, cultural, economic and political relationships 2. transnational networks have produced a type of consciousness, marked by multiple senses of identification, comprising of everchanging representations 3. transnationalism involves a mode of cultural reproduction, associated with a fluidity of constructed styles, social institutions and everyday practices 4. transnationalism is linked to new practices of capital formations that arguably involve globe-spanning structures or networks that have largely become disconnected from their national origins 5. transnationalism is viewed as a site for political engagement where cosmopolitan anti-nationalist sentiments often exist alongside reactionary ethno-nationalist notions 6. transnationalism has reconstructed localities, regrouping, as a result of the mobility of people and ideas, the practices and meanings derived from multiple geographical and historical points of origin

6 In the past two decades, an understanding of space as an objective phenomenon has been largely abandoned (Massey 2005), replaced with an idea that suggests a social grid within which objects are located, events occur and relations articulated. space does not represent a passive geometry, but is continuously produced through socio-spatial relations: it is better conceived as a product of a specific set of cultural, social, political and economic interactions. This complex relational view of space provides a useful theoretical resource with which to understand the contemporary drivers, forms and consequences of international student mobility, and the challenges international students confront in understanding their mobility, negotiating the transnationality of their experiences, and making calculation about how to strategically position themselves in transnational spaces they have themselves helped create.

7 NASIR S STORY The transnational incorporated within the structures of national politics national interests in the experiences of international students

8 NEELU S STORY [cosmopolitanization of attitudes and values how transnational experiences help develop global competence ]

9 KAMAL S STORY [how the production of knowledge in transnational space is inherently political and how this politics in exasperated for international students subjected to conflicting political pressures]

10 MARINA S STORY [politics of recognition how international students are subjected to contradictory discourses --of benefits and of threats and control]

11 SHANTI S STORY [ [pulled in a number of different competing directions --from home, diaspora and the profession]