This edited volume explores core questions on education and transnational mobility in a time characterized by a global pandemic, recasting them through the lenses of regimes, experiences, and aspirations. The volume brings together 20 short essays in the form of letters addressed to the coronavirus and written by international students , together with eight striking illustrations that depict emotive scenes from the essays, and eight academic commentaries that analytically link these personal narratives to broader societal structures. This book represents a timely intervention, providing an intimate glimpse into young people’s hopes and the challenges they face concerning their education and mobility.

Over 2.7m students study in a country other than their own. Most of those students come from the Asia-Pacific region and undertake study in universities in the developed world. This trend is predicted to grow exponentially but features many dilemmas. In the post-9/11 global environment, international students experience hostility and harassment as well as ambivalence about their value to the academy. Some live an uncertain life of poverty and alienation. Many also struggle to come to terms with living and studying in a foreign land where there are concerns about international students eroding academic standards, having poor English language proficiency and being unable to “integrate” and contribute to their new communities. But some also seek to make new homes in their host countries. The contributions in this book explore the complex and diverse aspects of transnational education and propose some pragmatic approaches to these dilemmas. These contributions explore new ways of looking at the phenomena of international students, their social and cultural needs, as well as the challenges for teaching and learning, research supervision and English language in the academy. The book presents case studies and documents initiatives that are positive responses to the dilemmas of global student mobility.

This book analyses the multifaceted ways law operates in the context of human mobility, as well as the ways in which human mobility affects law. Migration law is conventionally understood as a tool to regulate human movement across borders, and to define the rights and limits related to this movement. But drawing upon the emergence and development of the discipline of mobility studies, this book pushes the idea of migration law towards a more general concept of mobility that encompass the various processes, effects, and consequences of movement in a globalized world. In this respect, the book pursues a shift in perspective on how law is understood. Drawing on the concepts of ‘kinology’ and ‘kinopolitics’ developed by Thomas Nail as well as ‘mobility justice’ developed by Mimi Sheller, the book considers movement and motion as a constructive force behind political and social systems; and hence stability that needs to be explained and justified. Tracing the processes through which static forms, such as state, citizenship, or border, are constructed and how they partake in production of differential mobility, the book challenges the conventional understanding of migration law. More specifically, and in revealing its contingent and unstable nature, the book reveals how human mobility is itself constitutive of law. This interdisciplinary book will appeal to those working in the areas of migration and refugee law, citizenship studies, mobility studies, legal theory, and sociolegal studies.

This book documents the growing mobility of international students in the Asia Pacific. International students comprise over 2.7m students and it is estimated by the OECD that this will top 8 million in 2020. The great majority of them are students from the Asian countries who study in the Europe, North America and Asia. In addition countries such as Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong are becoming “education hubs” and are proposing to attract international students. Over 42% of international students come from Asia and this is predicted to continue with the strong presence of students from China, India, Korea and Japan continuing. A younger population, a growing middle class and shortages of quality education providers in the Asia Pacific region means that this mobility will be a feature of the future. This book explores questions around the mobility of international students in the context of the global economy and an increasingly competitive trans-national education market. It also explores questions about the experience of international students principally from the Asia Pacific region at a time of increased global insecurity and growing hostile reactions to foreigners in the post September 11th era. This book emerges from empirical work from several research projects funded by the World Bank and several community projects to support international students. The focus is also on the way in which student mobility promotes growing connection within the Asia Pacific, as well as other regions, and provides the foundations for new notions of global citizenships.

This volume explores the implications of student mobility on higher education across the Asia Pacific Region. Student Mobility has become a major feature of higher education throughout the world, and most particularly over the past two decades within the Asia Pacific Region. This system of mobility is entering a period of profound predicted change, created by the social and economic transformations being occasioned by the rapid increased uses of artificial intelligence (AI), a process that is being increasingly framed as the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” or Work 4.0, a process that is widely predicted to evoke fundamental changes in the ways that work is performed and who does it. This volume explores various dimensions of this process, examining various aspects of the process as they are affecting national and regional economies even as the phenomenon produces a wide variety of engagements with the global economy as a whole.

This book examines an emergent pattern of international student mobility: that of international students from across the African continent who are enrolled on degree programmes at Chinese universities. China is among the most popular destination countries for African students, yet there has been little research to-date into this emergent mobility pattern. Drawing on data from a series of interviews, the book focuses on the specific modalities of integration into the global economy of both the sending region and the host country, and examines how these shape the decision-making, experiences, and future aspirations of mobile students. It also highlights how incipient flows of international student migrants, such as those between various African countries and China, are calling into question a number of the axioms around the study of international study mobility that were developed with reference to more established migration patterns, which tend to flow from other regions to the West. These include, for example, the idea that international students are generally privileged members of the global middle class who seek an education abroad as part of a strategy to accumulate cultural capital and reproduce social privilege. This novel work is of interest to researchers in human geography, sociology, development studies, migration studies, and particularly those studying China-Africa relations.

Higher education increasingly entails a crossing of national, linguistic and cultural boundaries. Recent years have seen significant expansion in the sector around transnational education and online learning, with students, academic staff, educational programmes and even institutions all ever-more mobile. This expansion is usually seen in unproblematic terms, with economic growth the main priority in view. The challenge that is entailed in pursuing social justice in the face of such global expansion, however, should not be underestimated. This book subjects to critical scrutiny the uncertainties that are associated with internationalised higher education. It explores how the agency of teachers, other members of staff and students is mediated by experiences of inclusion and exclusion. Physical or virtual movement around the globe may have become more straightforward in recent years, but the same cannot be said of intercultural relations in classrooms. Challenges can be expected where concerns, projects and practices of students are pursued in an unfamiliar cultural setting, or where agency crosses over more than one cultural system. Finally, mobility often throws up situations in which privileges are accompanied by distressing challenges. The book teases out the implications of all these issues for teaching in higher education. It will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of education, politics, sociology, human geography and social work. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal, Teaching in Higher Education.

The growing mobility of people within and into the Asia Pacific region has created environments of increasing diversity as nations become hosts to both permanent and temporary multicultural societies. How do we begin to gauge the impact of mobility and multiculturalism on individuals and groups in this diverse region today? The authors of The Asia Pacific in the Age of Transnational Mobility turn to social media as a tool of inquiry to map how mobile subjects and minorities articulate their sense of community and identity. The authors see social media as a platform that allows users to document and express their individual and collective identities, sometimes in restrictive communication environments, while providing a sense of belonging and agency. They present original empirical work that attempts to help readers understand how mobile subjects who circulate in the Asia Pacific create a sense of community for themselves and articulate their ethnic, ideological and national identities.

Providing a critical overview of transnationalism as a concept, this Handbook looks at its growing influence in an era of high-speed, globalised interconnectivity. It offers crucial insights on how approaches to transnationalism have altered how we think about social life from the family to the nation-state, whilst also challenging the predominance of methodologically nationalist analyses.

As globalisation deepens, student mobility and migration has not only impacted economy and institutions, it has also infused human desires, imaginaries, experiences and subjectivities. In Transnational Students and Mobility, Hannah Soong portrays the vexed nexus of education and migration as a site of multiple tensions and existence and examines how the notion of imagined mobility through education-migration nexus transforms the social value of international education and transnational mobility.