Infrastructures of immobility: enabling international distance education students in Africa to not move

ABSTRACT

There is now a large literature discussing how mobilities are part of contemporary everyday power geometries and is a resource to which people have unequal access. This body of work has, thus, valorised mobility as a desirable good. Why some people choose immobility and what has to be mobilised to enable this immobility has received much less attention. This paper draws on interviews with international distance education students in Namibia and Zimbabwe studying at the University of South Africa (UNISA) to explore the spatio-temporal underpinnings to why students choose to remain at home while studying abroad and how this is arranged. It outlines the infrastructures of reach that enable student immobility and how their incomplete nature means that students have to rely on extensive systems of mobilities of other people and objects to ensure that their study progresses without their own educational mobility. In doing so we move away from considering immobility as a result of limited access to mobility. Instead, we set out a new research agenda on why and how the infrastructures of immobilities are important in mobility research.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobilities
• immobilities
• infrastructure
• distance education
• intermediary

Acknowledgments

The IDEAS project is a interdisciplinary project and we acknowledge the varied contributions of all the team members as well as that of student respondents. Their time and insights are much appreciated. We would also like to thank Gunjan Sondhi and an anonymous reviewer for their feedback on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We have used pseudonyms throughout this paper.

2. These everyday mobilities may have been a significant part of their lives but due to issues of length they are not discussed here. Moreover, in this paper, we were interested in unsettling the narrative of international education as usually involving international migration and of immobility as a problem faced by Africans who desire to migrate. In this paper, we have therefore only focused on education-related mobilities.

Additional information

Funding

The IDEAS project is funded by a Newton Grant from the Economic and Social Research Council, UK [ES/P002161/1] and the National Research Foundation, SA [UTSA160329161196].