Student mobility and the production of Chile as an international academic hub

ABSTRACT

In this paper, an analysis of the spatial production of Chile as an international academic destination for doctoral students is put forward. This arises from the notion of internationalisation as a process of the rescaling of university marketplaces and international students as consumers of global scales of excellence. As such, it proposes the concept of an international academic hub to understand how a space oriented towards a ‘global north’ is produced and articulated with the guidelines of economic globalisation. Four case studies of interviews with foreign doctoral students in Chile are used to explore narratives of the international in discourses about academic trajectories within the country. The results indicate that Chile is configured as a compensatory destination and that its internationalisation policies indicate a directionality towards globally legitimised destinations.

KEYWORDS:

• International academic mobility
• jumping scales
• academic hubs
• international students
• internationalisation of higher education
• Latin America

Acknowledgements

I thank Professor Claudia Matus, for her outstanding guidance, and all students that participated in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 According to Espinoza (2017), the change promoted by the neoliberal technocrats transformed universities and other social services into entities that satisfy and are maintained by those who require their services; transforming them into consumer goods and not social goods. In this way, the dynamics and functioning of higher education institutions would be subject to the territory of the marketplace and only regulated by the State. This leads to growth in the adoption of accountability and market promotion practices.

2 inglés urumitero, referring to the Urumita region of Colombia.

3 afuera, lit. outside, is also often used in a similar fashion to abroad.

4 ‘no sé que chingadera’: chingadera is a colloquial Mexican expletive, the noun form of the verb chingar, lit. to fuck.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica [grant number 21160217].