Events

As the COVID-19 pandemic forced borders to close, international student mobilities have first ground to a halt and, with the uneven progress of the vaccine rollout across the world, are now in the throes of a gradual reboot. There were about 5.3 million international students worldwide by the time of the virus outbreak, many of whom have now been impacted by the tightening of border control and travel restrictions. Furthermore, as vaccination programmes are rolled out unevenly across different countries, systems of border controls to regulate mobility, such as ‘travel corridors’, ‘green lanes’, ‘immunity passports’, and ‘vaccinated travel lanes’, would not only regulate immigration and emigration with a higher degree of selectivity but potentially redirect migrant flows. Given the ongoing transmission of the Omicron variant, international student mobilities and immobilities will continue to undergo reconfiguration at both the scales of the trans-national as well as the everyday life.

This double-session seminar gathers scholars with an interest in international education and student mobilities to present their research on and reflect upon how mobile youths, migration infrastructures, and global higher education have responded in an exceptional time of stalled mobility and pandemic-driven concerns. In doing so, we identify and assess the longer-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in shifting migration and education regimes as well as the aspirations and identities of mobile students. Lastly, we give overdue attention to understanding the regional dynamics underpinning the international student mobility regime of globalising universities in the Asia-Pacific (Session 1) and in the ‘West’ (Session 2). Our speakers will tackle the topic by drawing on their own research on migrations and migrant lives in the Australia, mainland China and Hong Kong, the United Kingdom and the United States respectively.

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SESSION 1 | 5 April 2022, 2.00 – 3.00pm SGT 

Brokers, Migrant Networks, and Enterprising Students: The Case of Vietnamese in Australia
Lan Anh Hoang | University of Melbourne

As of 2019, Vietnam-born residents represented the sixth largest migrant group in Australia, accounting for 263,000 people, and Vietnam has been one of the top ten source countries in Australia’s Migration Programme in the last ten years. While the early waves of Vietnamese migration comprised mainly refugees and their families, education and skilled migrants now predominate in the Vietnam-Australia migration corridor. In this paper, I draw from qualitative research conducted in Hanoi and Melbourne in 2019-2022 to offer insights into the various ways in which migrant and brokerage networks shape Vietnamese migration flows to Australia. In the current scholarly debates, the actors, networks, institutions, and technologies that sustain transnational social ties tend to be treated separately from profit-oriented migration mediating structures, but they often overlap in reality. My study shows that migrant networks and commercial brokers are not distinct dimensions of ‘migration infrastructure’ but intertwined, self-perpetuating categories. It highlights important gaps between policy and practice in Australia’s migration regime.

Lan Anh Hoang is Associate Professor in Development Studies in the School of Social and Political Sciences, the University of Melbourne. Her current project examines brokerage and migrant networks in the Vietnam-Australia migration corridor. Lan’s research has been published in many prestigious journals such as Gender and Society, Gender, Place and Culture, Global Networks, Population, Space and Place, Geoforum, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Asian Studies Review, and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. She is author of ‘Vietnamese migrants in Russia: mobility in times of uncertainty’ (Amsterdam University Press 2020) and co-editor of ‘Transnational Labour Migration, Remittances, and the Changing Family in Asia’ (2015) and ‘Money and Moralities in Contemporary Asia’ (2019).

The Present and Future of Africa-China International Student Mobility
Benjamin Mulvey | Education University of Hong Kong

In this seminar, I aim to analyse how African student migrants in China navigate global structural inequalities in making decisions around mobility, both before studying abroad and after graduation, while strategising to overcome barriers to mobility and capital accumulation. I argue that China’s position within the contemporary global political economy is reflected in the ways these student migrants navigate intersecting global mobility regimes. I also seek to discuss the implications that both the pandemic and recent shifts in global geopolitics may have for the future of international student mobility to China in general, and for mobility from the African continent in particular.

Benjamin Mulvey is RGC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Education and Human Development at the Education University of Hong Kong, and Associate Tutor in the School of Education at the University of Glasgow. His research is focused on the sociology of higher education, and has been published in journals such as Sociology, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Population, Space and Place, and British Journal of Sociology of Education.

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SESSION 2 | 7 April 2022, 7.00 – 8.00pm SGT

Transnational Knowledge Mobility in a Post-Pandemic World
Juan Zhang | University of Bristol

The global landscape of higher education has been fundamentally transformed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Transnational academic mobilities and educational practices have been reconfigured to simultaneously incorporate more restrictions as well as greater flexibilities. How is this seemingly contradictory task achieved and how do we understand transnational knowledge mobility in a post-pandemic world marked by deepening political and cultural frictions as well as uncertain economic futures? This talk offers preliminary reflections on the interlinked processes and structures that both facilitate and restrict transnational higher education mobilities. A new perspective is needed to look at not only state- and market-led processes that move knowledge seekers as migrants from one location to another, but also how informal networks, connections, digital and in-person practices at the level of the everyday constitute a key aspect of global knowledge migration in what scholars and policy makers announce as the Covid decade.

Juan Zhang is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Bristol. Juan’s research explores borders and transnational mobilities in various forms – from memories and livelihoods at the margins of China and Vietnam, to the global flows of labour and capital in and out of Asian casino spaces; from transnational marriages and family life to Asian migrant im/mobilities under differentiated pandemic governance. Broadly speaking, Juan’s research engages with three main themes: Asian borderlands, migrant im/mobilities and transnationalism, transnational cultural politics and China.

Arrested Mobilities: International Students in the USA during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Elizabeth Chacko | George Washington University

The USA attracts the greatest number of international students and is also the prime destination for higher education for students from India. In this paper I investigate the mobilities of Indian international students who were enrolled in undergraduate and graduate programs in American universities during the COVID pandemic years of 2020-2021. I investigate how these students’ physical, transnational, occupational and positional mobilities were compromised in space and time on account of the pandemic. I explore how students navigated arrested mobilities that were produced by changes in policies, legal status, financial resources, international transportation and threats to health and safety and how they forged new pathways and strategies to reach their goals.

Elizabeth Chacko is Professor of Geography and International Affairs at George Washington University. Her research focuses on flows of people, capital, and ideas, and their impacts on social, cultural, economic, and urban geographies. She has conducted fieldwork related to migration in the United States, India, Ethiopia, Singapore, and Malaysia. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Commission, the National Science Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. Elizabeth is a keen amateur photographer, especially interested in documenting the particularities of places.

WORKSHOP CONVENORS

Prof Brenda S.A. YEOH
Asia Research Institute, and Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

Dr Yi’En CHENG
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

Dr Peidong YANG
National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this online workshop has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the event.