Educational Mobility and the Gendered Geography of Cultural Capital: The Case of International Student Flows between Central Asia and the UK

Abstract

International student mobility from East to West has grown rapidly as the middleclasses have sought to reproduce their advantage in the context of changing socioeconomic circumstances. Existing research shows that middle-class students and their parents are increasingly using overseas educational qualifications -an institutionalised form of cultural capital -to ensure they stand out in the competition for lucrative employment. This paper makes two unique contributions to these debates. Firstly, it broadens the spatial frame away from East Asia to the emerging educational markets in post-Soviet Central Asia, and specifically Kazakhstan. This shift allows examination of similarities in students' accrual of cultural capital between regions, but also highlights spatial specificity in these flows. Secondly, it moves beyond narrowly class-based approaches to spotlight the importance of gender, sexuality and religion in geographies of cultural capital. Middle-class social reproduction helps drive international student mobility, but class is experienced differently by young men and women in the context of locally-specific forms of heterosexuality, which in this case-study reflect the cultural importance of Islam. Class matters, but to fully understand its importance in student mobility we must trace its intersections with other axes of social difference.1 All authors made an equally valuable contribution to this research.2

International students with dependent children: the reproduction of gender norms

“…In some countries this is formalised, with students in receipt of government scholarships for study abroad being able to choose from only a list of prescribed (and prestigious) institutions (Holloway, O'Hara, and Pimlott-Wilson 2012). In other cases, the influence is informal but often equally strong.…”

Introduction: international academic mobility and inequalities

“…It has been documented, for example, that gender plays a significant role in shaping international academic mobility patterns (see e.g. Bauder 2015;Holloway, O'Hara, and Pimlott-Wilson 2012;Shinozaki 2017;Sondhi & King 2017). At the undergraduate and graduate student level, mobile female students are often overrepresented (Böttcher et al 2016;Jöns 2011).…”

Between striated and smooth space: Exploring the topology of transnational student mobility

“…He was neither escaping from a place nor rushing towards a new one; instead, he was searching for new experiences and places that would support his adventures and lifestyle preferences. However, for the interviewed students and most transnational students, being a foreign student in Trondheim was primarily part of an imagined professional career plan that involved an anticipated future occupation (Brooks and Waters, 2011;Holloway et al, 2012). As Trondheim is a rather small city, the students did not have strong associations with it prior to their migration.…”

“…Although 'power' has been an explicit concept in the literature on transnational student mobility to a limited degree, the effect of power is discussed in relation to issues such as how international higher education influences the reproduction of class (Brooks and Waters, 2011;Holloway et al, 2012) and produces new and old forms of geographical unevenness (Perkins and Neumayer, 2014). This reproduction of unevenness, social and geographical, is typically explained through structural factors, such as visa regulations, national immigration or education policies, existing academic networks (Barnett et al, 2015).…”