Race, whiteness and internationality in transnational education: academic and teacher expatriates in Malaysia

ABSTRACT

The expansion of transnational education has diversified the destinations and mobility patterns of academic and teacher expatriates (i.e. education expatriates). Emerging literature have explored white Anglo-Western expatriates’ experiences of racism and racialization in non-white majority settings, but these are not usually analysed alongside that of less- and non-white expatriates. This article does so by drawing from qualitative interviews with forty racially diverse education expatriates in Malaysia to explore differential experiences in work, immigration and everyday life. It investigates expatriate experiences at the intersection of race, nationality and skin colour, and where relevant, the interconnections with gender, age, class and religion. It critically examines how education expatriates respond to their hierarchical position(ing)s within the dominant racial logics of (white) Westernness in postcolonial Malaysia. A translocational positionality approach offers valuable intersectional insights into the racialized processes that stratify education expatriates’ experiences of (dis)advantage and capital convertibility in contingent and contradictory ways.

KEYWORDS:

• Translocational positionality
• racism and racialization
• white privilege
• transnational education
• academic and teacher expatriates
• cultural capital

Acknowledgements

We thank the journal editors, special issue editors, and reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions on this article. We also thank our research assistants Skye Lim Jia Yi, Kate Ng Jia Yi, Kieran Li Nair, and Tracy Leong Pooi See for their assistance.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 In this article, we refer to the two groups as “education expatriates”.

2 For example, the 1881 Straits Settlements census listed “Aborigines”, “Achinese”, “Boyanese”, “Bugis”, “Dyaks”, “Javanese”, “Jawi Pekans”, “Malays” and “Manilamen” as separate ethnic categories; but by 1891, these ethnicities were classified as “Malays and other Natives of the Archipelago” (Hirschman 1987, 571).

3 We focused on the private sector as it is the main employer of education expatriates (usually through job advertisements and secondments).

4 The participants came to Malaysia for work, adventure, study, familial and personal reasons that will be the focus of a future paper.

5 Colloquial and pidgin variant of Malaysian English.

6 Dark-skinned migrants tend to be singled out and are subject to racial profiling by police authorities in Malaysia (Daniels 2014; Kandale 2018).

7 White Westerner in colloquial Malay.

8 While Malaysians value a native English accent (especially British and American), they do not pay particular attention to or are not necessarily able to distinguish between different accented English linked to “Westerners”.

9 Also see Cranston (2017) on British expatriates in Singapore.

Additional information

Funding

This research received funding from the Monash University Malaysia School of Arts and Social Sciences Internal Research Grant 216-18 and 204-19.