National exceptionalism in the ‘EduCanada’ brand: unpacking the ethics of internationalization marketing in Canada

ABSTRACT

Canada’s recently revamped international education brand, EduCanada, offers a rich example of developments at the intersections of higher education internationalization and marketization. In this paper, I examine the EduCanada website to consider how national exceptionalist and ‘othering’ narratives are reproduced in the recruitment of international students. From these findings I ask how internationalization relates to the overlapping and ongoing legacies of Indigenous colonization, and racialized regimes of personhood, citizenship, and immigration in Canada. Finally, I argue that the international marketization of higher education risks foreclosing critical examinations of the entanglements of empire within which we are all unevenly embedded.

KEYWORDS:

• Branding
• internationalization
• marketization
• nationalism
• race
• colonialism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Sharon Stein http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6995-8274

Notes

1. There were 336,000 international students in Canada in 2014 (CBIE, 2014). This number includes students at all levels of schooling, not just post-secondary students.

2. I intentionally employ the male pronoun here to indicate the gendered aspects of this exalted subject (Howell, 2005), though it is not only men who (seek to) embody this position.

3. For instance, this conditionality was evident in the 2015 passage of the Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act, through which those with dual citizenship may have their Canadian citizenship revoked if convicted of certain crimes (Citizenship and Immigration Canada, 2015).

4. All quotes are from EduCanada webpages; the specific section referenced is listed after each quote.

5. Brunner (2016b) suggests actual numbers may in fact be much higher.

6. I quote from Byrd, but substitute the US for Canada; one might substitute other settler colonial contexts.