Transnational spaces of education as infrastructures of im/mobility

Abstract

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Education‐migration brokers, international student mobilities and digital transformations in pre‐ and post‐pandemic times

“…Brokers can also become significant actors in countering anti‐migration policies aimed at curbing migration in‐flows (Roos Breines et al., 2019). For instance, Kleibert (2022) observes that universities can take on brokerage functions in overseeing, regulating, and monetizing student (im)mobilities while states implement restrictive education‐migration policies in governing international students. By broadening the understanding of commercial brokering to include the role assumed by universities, scholars argue that countries with strict migration policies often rely on universities' capabilities to manage international students in a way that limits their interactions with local institutions and domestic students, while capitalizing on the economic benefits associated with international student mobilities (Bobée & Kleibert, 2022).…”

Geographical education I: fields, interactions and relationships

“…Kučerová et al, (2020) discuss a range of international bodies of work and institutional patterns, each of which has attended to the distinction between formal and informal educational spaces (Gough et al, 2019), and in varying ways to movements across, between and within these spaces. Movement, mainly in terms of student mobilities and transnational spaces of education (Kleibert, 2022), illustrates the emphasis on education as a dynamic process that changes people and places (Caciagli, 2019). In Krishnan’s (2019) ethnographic work with young women in Chennai, being a college-girl has multiple implications for how urban life is experienced, particularly through formal education’s distinctive times and spaces, and its production of colonial and gendered middle-class subjectivities.…”

Social geography II: Space and Sociality

“…Lin (2020) further emphasises that an infrastructural perspective should give attention to how anticipated and unanticipated events continuously ‘fuel the making and unmaking of geographies’ (ibid, 1772). In migration and mobility studies, an infrastructural perspective is used in Kleibert’s (2022) research on offshore higher education campuses to shift the prevailing focus from migrants, their families and communities towards studying how migration or mobility brokers (including campuses) operate as and within institutions and networks (see also Xiang and Lindquist, 2014). For Barua (2021) – writing about more-than-human geographies – an infrastructural perspective is an ontology that seeks to decentre anthropocentrism in favour of giving greater attention to the infrastructures populated by a ‘non-human habitus’ (Barua, 2021: 1469) of animals, but which can have a bearing on human life or abandonment.…”