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The number of international students arriving in Canada is increasing annually, with students from China accounting for the highest number. Grounded in sociocultural theories of second language learning, identity, investment and Community of Practice (CoP), this paper presents selected findings from a narrative study investigating the experiences of Chinese international students preparing for the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) tests in Canada. Based on their own accounts of English learning before and after coming to Vancouver, this paper finds that the participants recognized the capital and power of English and foreign qualifications, and regarded international education as a sanctuary from examinations in China. By comparing their current learning in different settings, they expressed confusion about engaging/disengaging in different communities, and about their past expectations, current experiences as well as future possibilities. This paper hopes to draw the attention of stakeholders (institutions and test issuing organizations) to the more nuanced challenges that international students encounter so that better support can be provided to international students learning English for academic purposes.

Purpose -The aim in this paper is to extend Dorothy Smith's conceptual understanding of work to consider the emerging labor of ''knowmads'' within internationalization of higher education. Through original research on everyday experiences of internationalization, the authors seek to illuminate the ways individuals develop skills and competencies in relation to these new forms of work in order to address the reproduction of inequities. The authors make a connection between internationalization of higher education and knowmadic labor based on the premise that cross-border education is often pursued in order to develop knowmadic attributes. Design/methodology/approach -Through a critical institutional ethnography of one mid-sized Canadian university, the paper uses survey and interview data gathered from students and facultyindividuals who are involved in knowmadic labor connected to internationalization -to illustrate some of the study participants' daily experiences of internationalization coordinated by the institutional structures of the university in times of globalization.Findings -It is concluded that internationalization and connecting new forms of work involved in becoming and producing knowmads not only bypass and disregard present inequities in higher education, but work to reproduce them in new ways.Practical implications -The paper provides insight in regards to processes and allocation of work within internationalization, while addressing forms of social inequities that often cut across these practices and concludes with brief comments on the implications of academic knowmadic labor in Western higher education institutions engaged in internationalization.Originality/value -While research has been conducted on work in international contexts, little has addressed ''the labor'' that is involved in becoming knowmads, and that of ''producing'' knowmads. The paper draws connections between the internationalization of higher education and knowmadic work showing that knowmadic labor is often preceded by knowmadic educational opportunities. The cosmopolitan vision of creating globally aware citizens, with international knowledge, skills, and competencies that institutions espouse, are assumed to be good per se, and to lead to knowmadic qualities and attributes required in a knowmad society. The paper questions these assumptions and the relations of power on which they rest.

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Despite the critiques generated in critical internationalization studies in response to the neoliberal and neocolonial orientation of internationalization of higher education, the direction of internationalization appears to be unchanged. This paper takes up the challenge of imagining internationalization otherwise by drawing from the field of post-development (PD) studies, which, it is argued, has parallels to the realities and debates on internationalization. An overview of the debates in PD and why they offer important ideas for critical internationalization studies will be followed by a discussion of how key analyses and arguments in PD can be applied to internationalization. This argument leads to the question of whether it is time to recognize an emerging post-internationalization movement, acknowledging that internationalization as we know it is in decline.