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This article examines practices surrounding short-term study abroad, focusing on how its outsourcing to professional agencies can shape student encounters abroad. Through ethnographic work in Southeast Asia, I explore the "exposure model" of intercultural learning relied on by many programs. I argue that for-profit providers, catering to administrative and neoliberal exigencies in higher education, have fostered an uncritical "discourse of going," which subordinates consideration of pedagogical goals and outcomes to the imperative of increasing participation. [Experiential education; intercultural learning; short-term study abroad; Southeast Asia; study abroad] Over the past fifteen years, study abroad at American institutions of higher education has shifted dramatically away from semester-long programs that are commonly connected with overseas universities, and toward short-term programs (Institute of International Education and Farrugia 2018), which demonstrate much greater variability of pedagogical approach and practice (Mercer 2015; Tarrant, Rubin, and Stoner 2014; Willis and Beyene 2018). This change has been wrapped in a narrative of progress and accomplishment that originates both from scholars and practitioners (e.g. Bellamy and Weinberg 2006;Chieffo and Griffiths 2004;DeLoach et al. 2003), many of whom are themselves involved in directing short-term programs, or who have taken on the objective of "internationalization" for their campuses (Fischer 2008;Kreber 2009). This project takes as foundational the belief that getting students out of the country-as part of an academic agenda, broadly construed-should be the primary goal of internationalization advocates at American colleges and universities, and that the nature of that academic agenda is at best a secondary consideration. In this article, I argue that the rise of this "discourse of going" is best understood as another dimension of the shift toward a discursively corporate lens and the neoliberal model of higher education that Readings (1996) termed the "university in ruins." Unlike practices generally opposed by faculty, such as the market-based ranking of scholars or increasing reliance on adjunct instructors, that are commonly associated with Readings' discussion (Vora 2015), this shift depends on a less visible penetration of the market via the promotion and "provision" of short-term faculty-led study abroad (hereafter STFLSA), which is often endorsed and celebrated by faculty as part of an undifferentiated advocacy for international education. This shift toward short-term programs depends on a powerful lacuna in the oversight of pedagogy abroad (Lemmons 2013) which not only transpires in a literal and figurative "overseas" space, but trades on the unrevised conception of travel as inherently educational and conferring of status. This conflation travel with global citizenship and experiential learning (Bennett 2012;Brodsky-Porges 1981;Robalik 2006) mirrors what La Brack and Bathurst term the "contact hypothesis" (2012, 208). In this article, I f...

While Indonesia's burgeoning private television industry has prospered through the country's democratic transition and the rise of popular Islam, it has remained ideologically constrained by many of the content restrictions established during Suharto's New Order era. One area in which producers have broken these norms is in the field of religious imagery, and the adaptation of religiously-themed narratives and tropes. This articlebased on a long-term ethnographic study of television producers in Indonesia and the social institutions that influence themexplores the strategies and goals behind the industry's handling of the imagined religious audience. It asserts that the tension of appeasing cultural conservatives has been redirected by the industry into content that appeals to the much larger demographic of moderate Muslims, through the adaptation of narrative conventions and stylistic forms that draw on an array of global media traditions. It examines new genres and conventions invoked by producers in their efforts to both placate and mobilize religious sentiment among Indonesia's culturally heterogeneous population, arguing that these practices promote a successful, commercial Islam that largely comports with neoliberal subjectivity.Kata Berkait was a moderately popular 1 quiz show on which I was lucky enough to be conducting ethnographic research when a special episode was taped for the Muslim holiday Idul Adha (Eid al-Adha in Arabic). The set's decorator brought in a load of brightly colored decorations, including ribbons and streamers that brought to mind a child's birthday party, and arranged them around the set along with a sign making it clear which holiday was being celebrated and displaying the year of the Islamic calendar. Accordingly, the casting director had made sure that only Muslim contestants would be appearing on that particular program (one of six being taped that day). The costume director brought in several 1 All references to the statistical popularity of programs are based on ratings research conducted by A. C. Nielsen company. Although there are flaws in their data collection methods, including strong urban and Javanese biases, their reports are accepted as the industry standard reference by stations and advertisers, and are invoked in that context. 1 headscarves (jilbab) for the three female contestants, colored as brightly as the streamers, and three black peci 2 for the men. The program had been arranged so that a team of women would play against a team of men, which was not the standard format of the program. It was December 2001, early in my research on the culture of national television production in Jakarta and before I had come to focus on Muslim-themed programming. Back in the dressing room, the female contestants struggled to put the jilbabs on one another. One told me that she normally wore a simpler design; another said she did not wear one at all. Donning the jilbab is often regarded as a life-long commitment, 3 but in this case they were spoken of (and rhetorically designated...

This essay explores models for short-term, faculty-led study abroad in cases where language skills cannot be expected of students, focusing on issues of local immersion and relationship-building. It explicates three models undertaken by the author, detailing the strengths and weaknesses of common trip structures and related course outlines, and offers recommendations for successful trip modelling. It further explores the relationship between short-term abroad trips and cultural tourism, focusing on a model that allows students a pedagogical space to reflect critically on anthropological stereotypes.

In this paper the authors analyze images from publications, produced by the Tibetan Government‐in‐Exile during the 1990s, that were used to educate Tibetan exiles living in India about health issues. The purpose is to show how the images promote pronatalism and ethnic endogamy–objectives that Tibetan exiles view as essential steps toward stemming a perceived threat, perpetrated by China, to their existence as a distinct ethnic group. The authors argue that the storybook aesthetics used in these images efface the ideological controversy of their encoded messages by evoking the style and authority of remedial health education.