International Students In Transnational Spaces

Xi Wu examines how national and transnational forces and discursive logic mediate international secondary school students’ educational routes and life trajectories. Drawing upon an ethnographic research program involving Chinese students in a Canadian international secondary school, Wu employs Ong’s notion of transnational cultural logics to examine students’ lives and how they flexibly and not-so-flexibly engaged in their learning and self-making in their transnational spaces. The book provides a comprehensive understanding of international students as agentic and socially regulated subjects in their transnational routes. These insights contribute to advancing curriculum and program improvements. Furthermore, Wu applies theoretical notions of "transnationalism" and "global and transnational cultural logics" to the examination of specific phenomenon and analyzes how cultural logics stemming from families, nations, and societies govern subjectivities in their actions and aspirations. This insightful book will be of interest to a wide range of education stakeholders, as well as scholars and researchers in comparative and international education.

"Wu examines how national and transnational forces and discursive logic mediate international secondary school students' educational routes and life trajectories. Drawing upon an ethnographic research program involving Chinese students in a Canadian international secondary school, Wu employs Ong's (1999) notion of transnational cultural logics to examine students' lives and how they flexibly and not-so-flexibly engaged in their learning and self-making in their transnational spaces. The book provides a comprehensive understanding of international students as agentic and socially regulated subjects in their transnational routes. These insights contribute to advancing curriculum and program improvements. Furthermore, Wu applies theoretical notions of 'transnationalism' and 'global and transnational cultural logics' to the examination of specific phenomenon, and analyses how cultural logics stemming from families, nations, and societies govern subjectivities in their actions and aspirations. This insightful book will be of interest to a wide range of education stakeholders, as well as scholars and researchers in comparative and international education"--

This book focuses on the interrelationship between international student connectedness and identity from transnational and transdisciplinary perspectives. It addresses the core issues surrounding international students’ physical and virtual connectedness to people, places and communities as well as the conditions that shape their transnational connectedness and identity formation. Further, it analyses the nature, diversity and complexity of international student connectedness and identity development across different national, social and cultural boundaries.

Social relations in our globalising world are increasingly stretched out across the borders of two or more nation-states. Yet, despite the growing academic interest in transnational economic networks, political movements and cultural forms, too little attention has been paid to the transformations of space that these processes both reflect and reproduce. Transnational Spaces takes a innovative perspective, looking at transnationalism as a social space that can be occupied by a wide range of actors, not all of whom are themselves directly connected to transnational migrant communities.

This book focuses on the interrelationship between international student connectedness and identity from transnational and transdisciplinary perspectives. It addresses the core issues surrounding international students’ physical and virtual connectedness to people, places and communities as well as the conditions that shape their transnational connectedness and identity formation. Further, it analyses the nature, diversity and complexity of international student connectedness and identity development across different national, social and cultural boundaries.

Recent terms such as globalisation, virtual reality, and cyberspace indicate that the traditional notion of the geographic and the social space is changing. New Transnational Social Spaces illustrates the contemporary relationship between the social and the spatial which has emerged with new communication and transportation technologies, alongside the massive transnational movement of people.

Based on narrative interviews with international students including egocentric network maps, this book explores international students’ role in the contexts they live in and how transnational spaces and internationality are (co-)created and defined in the students’ relationships. It offers insights into how students’ beings and belongings are intersected by connections to various places. These insights are an invitation to develop new strategies for internationalisation within higher education institutions by taking into consideration the students’ existing transnational networks.

This book offers critical insights into the geographies of the international student higher education experience from initial recruitment, through to the plethora of personal factors which influence their decisions to become mobile and experiences when abroad. From the student perspective these include, but are not limited to, the importance of social networks, desire for a multicultural experience and the attraction to certain locations as discussed in this volume. However, unlike other work, it also reflects on the motivations of the HEIs themselves and their need to continue recruiting students in the face of greater competition from overseas. Recognising this omission, this book also analyses the resulting migration industries and how these are sustained (and even necessitated) by the sector. It is, therefore, the first to bring together these wider institutional narratives with those of the students resulting in a holistic and comprehensive insight into the student mobility process.