Excavating cultural imperialism in student mobility programmes

ABSTRACT

The New Colombo Plan and similar student mobility initiatives in Aotearoa/New Zealand have been pitched as reversing the culturally imperialist focus of the original Colombo Plan (CP) because they involve sending Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand students to the Indo-Pacific region instead of funding Asian students to study overseas. However, changes in this direction of student mobility mask ongoing geopolitical inequities. In order to interrogate these subtle power relations, this article adopts a Foucauldian genealogical approach. It briefly outlines the competing goals of the original CP before undertaking an analysis of the discourses evident in the Australian government’s New Colombo Plan and in the Education New Zealand’s Prime Minister’s Scholarship for Asia. This discourse analysis illustrates the extent to which the new student mobility programmes established in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand involve consuming the ‘Indo-Pacific’ and ‘Asian’ Other and often serves to reinforce rather than address global geopolitical inequities.

KEYWORDS:

• Student mobility programmes
• Colombo Plan
• Aotearoa/New Zealand
• Australia
• genealogy
• cultural imperialism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I have deliberately chosen to use the term Aotearoa/New Zealand throughout this article even though it was formally adopted after the early years of the Colombo Plan. This is to emphasise that for Māori, the name of this country has always been Aotearoa.

2. Retrieved April 27, 2016, from http://dfat.gov.au/people-to-people/new-colombo-plan/resources/Pages/indigenous-students-participating-in-the-ncp.aspx