Study abroad as governmentality: the construction of hypermobile subjectivities in higher education

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the concept of hypermobility, the paper examines a case of study-abroad mobility from a governmentality perspective. Based on a critical analysis of policy texts and interviews with Irish students who have taken part in the Erasmus exchange programme, it argues that under the conditions of neoliberal globalisation, the normalisation of study abroad aims to produce self-governing practices that align with dominant discourses promoting voluntarist attitudes to labour mobility. These dispositions, described as hypermobility, are an additional dimension of the flexible, entrepreneurial subject imagined in neoliberal societies. The paper examines the discourses and practices at state and institutional levels and how they circulate and impact on students’ subjectivities – analysing affective detachment from home and cosmopolitan sociability as self-disciplining practices that align with the production of neoliberal hypermobile subjectivities.

KEYWORDS:

• Governmentality
• higher education
• hypermobility
• student mobility
• neoliberalism

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers; as well as Theresa O’Keefe, University College Cork; Tony Cunningham, Maynooth University; Aniko Horvath, UCL Institute of Education; Kathleen Lynch, University College Dublin; and Hugh Lauder, University of Bath for their helpful suggestions and comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. ‘Partner’ countries outside the region have also been recently added for some specific exchange programmes at postgraduate level.

2. Over 300,000 EU students take part in Erasmus programmes each year. The European Commission aims to double the budget allocated to Erasmus in the next funding phase, http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-3948_en.htm .

3. http://eurireland.ie/i-am-a/erasmus-student/study-periods/, last accessed in September 2018.

4. The project received full ethical approval from The National University of Ireland and all participants were de-identified in order to ensure confidentiality and anonymity.

5. Available in Courtois 2017.

6. See also Donnelly and Gamsu (2018) on student mobility from Northern Ireland to England.

7. See also Courtois 2018d for a distinction between ‘mass participation’, ‘elite’, ‘gap year’ and ‘original Erasmus’ models of student mobility programmes in Irish higher education institutions, where it is argued that the current expansion of Erasmus mobility primarily serves the goal of ‘mass participation’.

8. This discursive dissociation from ‘previous waves’ is discernible in the way recent Irish migrants ‘make sense’ of their mobility decisions (Ryan 2015) .

9. This appeared to be gendered as well as immobile male students were more likely to be described as ‘set in their ways’ or perhaps ‘narrow-minded’, while female students were the ones described as too emotionally attached to their mothers or boyfriends.

10. This may be contrasted with researchers’ criticism of EU policy for researchers’ mobility, e.g. Sautier (2018, 150).

11. The interviews took place before the Brexit referendum. Ireland is not part of the UK; the mobility of Irish citizens to the rest of the EU will not affected by a hard Brexit. Free movement of Irish citizens to the UK predates the EU and is unlikely to be affected either.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National University of Ireland [NUI Dr. Garret FitzGerald Post-Doctoral Fellowship].

Notes on contributors

Aline Courtois

Aline Courtois is Lecturer in the Department of Education, University of Bath, United Kingdom.