A caring transformation of international education: possibilities, challenges and change

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has had profound impacts on all facets of international education. Not only has it highlighted the inadequacy of existing care arrangements but it has also created new care needs. There is increased recognition among policy makers and education providers that they need to understand and support the wellbeing of international students more effectively – and indeed with greater care. Drawing on sociomaterial theories of care, this article considers the possibilities of care as a guiding principle for orienting the transformation of international education in more productive directions. Its central contention is that a focus on care will be vitally important for fostering the wellbeing of international students and for creating an institutional environment that more successfully attracts, retains, and supports them. Yet more than this, it will be crucial for redefining and realising the ambitious aims of international education itself. This article substantiates these claims by offering three ‘sketches’ of how a focus on care might reframe international education policy, institutional support, and point to new directions in research on international student mobility.

KEYWORDS:

• Wellbeing
• care
• international education
• international students
• higher education

Introduction

The need for international education to be more caring has arguably never been more pressing. Researchers in countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia have shown how international students are disproportionately affected by mental health issues, racial discrimination, challenges in the classroom and with finding work related to their degrees when they graduate (Guo & Guo, 2017; Heng, 2018). The COVID-19 pandemic has compounded many of these hardships and created new ones (Gomes & Forbes-Mewett, 2021; Mittelmeier & Cockayne, 2022). The shift to online learning in particular has created new challenges for educators seeking to enact pedagogies that foster engagement among a diverse set of students (Aitchison et al., 2020; Huang et al., 2022; Naylor & Nyanjom, 2021). It has also made it considerably more difficult for educators and institutions to apprehend international students’ care needs (Gravett et al., 2021). Beyond the functioning and operation of educational institutions themselves, the current period of globalisation is marked by catastrophic climate change, growing inequalities, war and authoritarianism (Ilieva et al., 2014; Silova, 2021). Each of these processes underscores the pressing need for international education to foster affirmative relationships and meaningful connections, and for it to create conditions that are more caring for humans, other species, and the environment.

In this context, policy makers, educational institutions and other actors have directed much greater attention to ideas around care and wellbeing in international education (Hong et al., 2022; Ramia et al., 2013). International students in several Anglophone countries have been the subject of policy initiatives and interventions designed to improve their experiences and prospects in educational institutions (Stein, 2017). Nevertheless, notions of care and wellbeing have been mobilised in an international educational landscape that is largely organised around neoliberal logics (Beech, 2022; Hong et al., 2022; Tight, 2019). The values neoliberalism encodes might come into conflict with the capacity of educational institutions and landscapes to foster wellbeing. For example, some scholars argue that the imperatives of neoliberalism have led to conditions in which international students have been treated as ‘cash cows’ rather than as human beings with diverse and changing needs (Robertson, 2011). Others point out the possibilities of promoting wellbeing are severely truncated by large scale job cuts, increasing workloads, and new metrics of performativity and accountability (Macfarlane, 2015; Naidoo & Williams, 2015). Researchers have also suggested that educational policy and practice is often founded on theories that enshrine individualism (Komatsu et al., 2021), and that fail to consider how care and wellbeing are shaped by entanglements with a vast array of materialities (Gravett et al., 2021). Taken together, these factors suggest the need for more robust understandings of care and wellbeing and a more coherent logic to shape international education policy and practice.

This article considers the possibilities of care as a guiding principle for promoting wellbeing and orienting the transformation of international education in more productive directions. It draws on sociomaterial theories of care that consider how human relationships are entangled with spaces, places, and environments and how these entanglements are constituted with objects, bodies and materialities. In spaces of education, this means attending to how the shifting assemblage of human and non-human actors shape learning, teaching and connections within and beyond classrooms (Fenwick & Landri, 2012; Gourlay, 2017; Gravett et al., 2021). The central contention of this article is that a focus on care will be vitally important for fostering the wellbeing of international students and for creating an institutional environment that more successfully attracts, retains, and supports them. Yet more than this, it will be critical for redefining and realising the ambitious aims of international education itself. The promise of a focus on care, then, is not just that it will aid ‘sector recovery’ but that it will open up new possibilities and directions for international education.

To substantiate these claims, this article offers three ‘sketches’ of how a focus on care and wellbeing might reframe international education policy, institutional support, and research about international students. Our analytical emphasis is centred on Anglophone countries that ‘receive’ most international students, including the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. Without conflating these contexts, we endeavour to move across them by drawing on relevant policy and research to support our arguments. In doing so, we are mindful that our claims – and particularly the ways that care and wellbeing are practiced and understood – may have different meanings and resonances elsewhere. While acknowledging this limitation, we anticipate that there might also be important similarities across geographies that prompt further inquiry and debate. Before proceeding with our sketches, we turn to a brief discussion of theories of care and their significance in the context of international education.

Theorising care in international education

A number of influential theorists and philosophers have attended to the fundamental significance of care for human beings (Barnes, 2012; Gilligan, 1982; Tronto, 2010). Care has been theorised as a set of practices (caring for), a way of conceptualising relationships (caring about), and as an ethics (ways of being) that are crucial for fostering human wellbeing. While varying significantly in focus, theories of care share an ontological starting point that humans are constituted through social relations that shape the ways they reason and act in the world (Lawson, 2009). This relational ontology rejects the individualism of much western philosophy and makes clear that all humans need to be cared for and cared about throughout their lives. Thinking about the significance of human relationships in educational settings has unsettled cognitivist framings of education by centring emotion and affect, and by considering their importance for nourishment, intellectual growth and fulfilment (Lynch, 2006; Naylor & Nyanjom, 2021). Noddings (2005), for instance, underscored the importance of care for engaging students, attending to their needs and for underpinning moral education. From Noddings’ (2005) perspective, education must develop a commitment to care among students and the capacities among them to provide it (see also Barnacle & Dall’Alba, 2017). Others have considered how relations of trust and mutuality between educators and students as well as among peers are vital for student engagement and learning (Anderson et al., 2020; Giles et al., 2012; Quinlan, 2016).

While initial theorising of care emphasised mutual interdependencies among people, such theories have recently been critiqued for centring human relationships at the expense of the broader entanglements of which those relationships are a part (Gravett et al., 2021). Understanding care in this way has tended to downplay the incredible range of interdependencies and ontologies that produce and sustain life (DeFalco, 2020; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Situated among a broader set of theories understood as posthuman (Nayar, 2013), sociomaterial theories emphasise how human action and social life is inextricably entangled with places, contexts and the environment as well as a vast array of objects, technologies and materialities (Orlikowski, 2010). In this sense, they decentre humans and extend their relational ontology. Yet more than this, objects, materialities and non-human actors are not seen as passive elements of practice, nor do they simply shape and constrain it. Instead, they are considered materially constitutive of a given phenomenon (Fenwick & Landri, 2012; Gourlay, 2017). This relational and distributed understanding of agency shifts how we think about care: if ‘traditional’ theories of care invoke an imagery of two co-located people with one providing care to the other, sociomaterial theories frame care as an emergent set of networked practices assembled by interdependent human and non-human actors. The possibilities of care thus emerge across a diversity of spatial and temporal scales through the constant attuning of knowledge, ideas, objects, and resources to create practices and spaces of relationality and engagement (Mol, 2008).

Thinking about care in this way enables deeper understanding of how care may operate through contexts of international education. Care is not strictly a situated human activity between students, educators and other staff, even though such relations may be crucially important. Care practices in international education emerge through constantly shifting networks and relations between entities in spaces of education, such as laptops, phones, desks, chairs, bodies, and digital technologies. An immediate example might be how the organisation of desks in a classroom may facilitate or inhibit dialogue and collaboration among students and educators. In this example, a sociomaterial perspective would not attribute agency strictly to individual actors (students and educators), or with technologies and other materialities (desks and laptops), but would consider how certain capacities for social action emerge through configurations between them (Nespor, 1994; Orlikowski, 2010; Zakharova & Jarke, 2022). At the same time, spaces of education and the possibilities of care are constituted in relation to policy discourses, knowledges, values, and ideas that affect the distribution of resources. The spatial organisation of classrooms may cohere with pedagogic practices known to foster care, for example, but economic considerations may compel universities to increase class sizes that make it difficult for actors to sustain practices of relationality and engagement. Even so, cogent practices of care might emerge where (or because) there is a care deficit, such as how international students form study groups and inclusive spaces on campus to help them meet learning requirements and foster wellbeing (Montgomery & McDowell, 2009).

Such considerations allude to the messiness of care (Murphy, 2015), and caution against oversimplifying the relationships between care and wellbeing. Following Puig de la Bellacasa (2017), we theorise the relationships between care and wellbeing as multiple and contingent rather than singular and causal. Indeed, care practices ideally foster wellbeing and might in some instances be the very enactment of wellbeing (Taylor, 2011). Yet while care can foster and constitute wellbeing, neither care or wellbeing are ever complete or achieved; they are processual and practiced (Mol, 2008). Moreover, well intended care can have consequences that are adverse for wellbeing (Murphy, 2015). This raises important questions about how class, race, gender and ethnicity affect how care is given (or not) and how it is received, as well as what counts as care (Arndt & Tesar, 2016). For instance, many international students may not want to access wellbeing initiatives and may conceal their hardships among peers for cultural reasons (Forbes-Mewett & Sawyer, 2016). Therefore, it cannot be taken for granted that a focus on care in international education will foster wellbeing. In this article, we situate the terms care and wellbeing alongside each other to register and not elide these complexities; while the terms are most certainly not interchangeable, it is difficult to conceive of one without the other, and so the phrase ‘care and wellbeing’ suitably holds them in proximity at the same time as it keeps them apart.

Despite the way recent theorising about care and wellbeing broadens their scope and possibilities, theory still tends to be built from empirical contexts associated with traditional models of caring, such as nursing homes and hospitals, childcare centres and the home (Bowlby, 2012; Ivanova et al., 2016; Mol, 2008). These settings orient empirical attention to children and the elderly and give thematic attention to issues such as healthcare and basic needs. Thinking about the significance and dynamics of care and wellbeing in the context of higher education thus charts the contours of an emerging research agenda, which has been advanced by several recent interventions (Gourlay, 2017; Gravett et al., 2021; Kinchin, 2022; Zakharova & Jarke, 2022). With this in mind, this article offers three provisional ‘sketches’ of how care and wellbeing offer novel ways of rethinking international education policy, institutional support and international students themselves. As the term ‘sketch’ suggests, these are provisional remarks intended to open up dialogue and discussion but not to define its parameters. In line with the notion of care itself, then, this article is written in a spirit of optimism and potential but without a sense of finality.

Care as a mode of rethinking international education policy

Over the last few decades, policy measures to support international students have been implemented in an ad hoc manner with varying degrees of success (Hong et al., 2022; Rizvi, 2011). But the COVID-19 pandemic has arguably precipitated a broader recognition across government departments and agencies about the significance of care and wellbeing among international students. In Australia, this is apparent in the Federal Government’s recent Australian Strategy for International Education 2021–2030 as well as the emergency response initiatives state governments have implemented to address the impacts of COVID-19. Indeed, COVID-19 response measures across diverse geographical settings were often coordinated with an express focus on fostering student wellbeing (El Masri & Sabzalieva, 2020). Despite the broader recognition of the importance of wellbeing for international students and the viability of international education, however, there is surprisingly little consideration of what is meant by wellbeing or how it could be achieved (Gravett & Ajjawi, 2022). Moreover, economic and commercial imperatives still tend to dominate policy discussions about international education and ‘sector recovery’, with care and wellbeing often being positioned as a means to that end (Beech, 2022).

A focus on care at the policy level shifts this emphasis such that wellbeing is pursued as an end in itself. Alongside aims such as deepening democracy and promoting interculturality, fostering the wellbeing of humans, other species and the environment becomes a central aim of international education. This has significant implications for international education policy. In an overarching sense, a focus on care and wellbeing adopts a much more critical stance toward economic considerations and associated values of competitiveness, autonomy, and individualism. Specifically, it only pursues economic ends to the extent that they foster human and planetary wellbeing. This focus does not downplay the importance of international education for creating meaningful opportunities for economic participation and engagement. But it means that it might reject opportunities for economic gain if those opportunities are inimical to care and wellbeing. And more than this, as a highly normative concept, a focus on care compels actors to rework economic arrangements if those arrangements are shown to cause harm (Tronto, 2010). This differs from operating on the basis of a ‘cost-benefit’ trade-off, where certain types of harms may be deemed acceptable, and where short term gains often outweigh long term costs, particularly if those costs are not attached to existing or potential markets.

Linked with a more critical stance to economic matters in international education policy is an explicit move to promote ethical and social responsibilities among students. A focus on care at the policy level encourages students to take a stand on what they are learning and who they are becoming (Barnacle & Dall’Alba, 2017; Noddings, 2005). In seeking to promote ethical ways of being and acting in the world, international education policy resists the current emphasis on skills acquisition, accreditation and jobs training. It is concerned with fostering care as a mark of personhood (Noddings, 2005), and nurturing the vast array of human and non-human behaviours, attachments and interdependencies that sustain life (DeFalco, 2020). These imperatives affect the ways that curricula are conceived and formulated. It is not just that care is taken when considering whose values, voices and knowledges are centred in curricula, but also that curricula are formulated in ways that promote wellbeing in a posthuman sense. Moreover, the relational ontology of care rejects the bounded logic of disciplinary ‘expertise’ in favour of tracing connections, relations, and possibilities among human and non-human actors. It also rejects the current division between policy makers and government departments seeking to facilitate student mobility and those who design, implement and revise curricula.

Current policy discussions about wellbeing in higher education are premised on a humanism that focuses quite strictly on student wellbeing (Snaza & Weaver, 2015). But in what might seem a counterintuitive shift, international education organised around a sociomaterial understanding of care and wellbeing decentres a focus on ‘the student’. The relational ontology of care positions humans in relation to other people, species, objects, spaces and the environment and emphasises the importance of sustainable and caring relationships between them. One implication of this is that a much broader set of considerations fall directly under the remit of international education policy. The imperatives of international education are bound up with concerns about climate change and ecological collapse and are inseparable from questions about social justice (Rousell, 2016). This relational ontology also compels international education policy to attend to how the shifting assemblage of spaces of international education promote care and wellbeing. This means that international education policy has an immediate stake in ensuring students have access to resources, such as nutritious and affordable food, as well as spaces, technologies and information that are conducive to study, conviviality, and learning (Jeffrey et al., 2022; Matthews et al., 2011). In this way, the relational ontology of care rejects the bounded logic of neoliberalism that might situate these considerations beyond their scope of concern.

Emerging studies have demonstrated that international students are giving more consideration to factors associated with their wellbeing when deciding on study destinations (Mok & Zhang, 2022). Yet as governments, policy makers and officials seek to recalibrate international education policy, there might be a tendency to co-opt the notions of care and wellbeing for commercial purposes (Beech, 2022). The development and promotion of new wellbeing initiatives, for instance, might signal an attempt to ‘recruit’ additional students more so than a genuine and robust attempt to foster care and wellbeing. Here, care and wellbeing may be operationalised as markers of an institution’s marketing strategy or a means to enhance its reputation and ranking (Macfarlane, 2015). In attending to the messiness of policy work (Gorur, 2011), critical research might examine the ways that different ideas around wellbeing are drawn on by different actors in different settings. It might interrogate the ways that understandings of care and wellbeing affect the forms of care that are developed and practiced. And it might also analyse how actors develop metrics for measuring success and authenticating their approaches to care and wellbeing.

Care as a mode of reframing institutional support

A focus on care and wellbeing disrupts conventional thinking about the aims, importance and imperatives of institutional support for international students. In the most immediate sense, the relational ontology of care rejects the commodified notion of ‘support’, conceived as a ‘service’, that students might ‘access’ in times of illness or infirmity (Ramia et al., 2013). Such arrangements – which are dominant in universities ordered around a logic of consumerism (Molesworth et al., 2009) – encode as normal an unhindered individual without care needs. But a focus on the relational and interdependent human subject works against the assumption that institutional support might be achieved by fine tuning neoliberal practice. It reframes care and wellbeing not merely as ‘needs’ that students may feel or express at particular times, but rather as a logic that infuses institution–international student relations. Here, it registers the notion of ‘academic hospitality’ in how it strives to create an environment marked by reciprocity and inclusion (Ploner, 2018). The logic of care asks simply ‘how might things be ordered differently to promote better care?’ (cf. Mol, 2008). There is still a place for specialised interventions in educational institutions for international students, such as learning supports, but these are complemented and strengthened by robust efforts at threading care through and across institutional spaces and processes.

Institutional arrangements in many settings tend to assume that students are passive recipients of support services (Arthur, 2017). This is especially the case for international students, with recent systematic literature reviews demonstrating that they still tend to be thought of from a deficit perspective (Heng, 2020; Lomer & Mittelmeier, 2021). But a focus on care disrupts conventional thinking about institutional support by locating international students as key agents in its provision (Deuchar, 2022b). There is mounting evidence that the most effective supports for international students are those that they codesign and deliver (Arthur, 2017; Tran et al., 2022). This is in part because students can often recognise and attend to the affective and changing needs of students more effectively than universities themselves. Student-led care practices also move away from the ‘information overload’ characteristic of dominant models and place greater emphasis on how, when, where and from whom international students might acquire and generate information (Montgomery, 2010). Moreover, the very act of participating in such practices could promote a sense of agency and well-being (Arthur, 2017). Importantly, however, a focus on care endeavours to create an environment where international students can care for each other, but resists creating an environment in which they must.

In the pursuit of wellbeing, care moves away from the notion that international students must assimilate or ‘fit in’ to a dominant host culture to have a fulfilling time abroad (cf. Ploner, 2018). The logic of care recognises instead that students’ needs are diverse and changing and that effective care for one student may not be effective care for another (Tronto, 2010). For this reason, international students’ needs cannot be known in advance and must be apprehended through listening and dialogue (Barnacle & Dall’Alba, 2017). Even so, a focus on care rejects the consumerist logic that students’ needs must always be met. It seeks to create an environment where students might extend their interests, become critically attuned to the world and their position within it, and develop a sense of social and ethical responsibility toward other humans and non-humans (Gravett et al., 2021). This might mean that students’ expressed needs may come into conflict with the imperatives of a caring institution, such as when an international student does not respond to careful prompts to meet the requirements of their degree. In such instances, the focus of care and wellbeing is about keeping the caring relation intact and enabling international students to pursue a path that fosters their nourishment and growth (Barnacle & Dall’Alba, 2017).

The relational ontology of care also extends the scope of institutional support and attends to the vast array of bodies and materialities that matter in the context of international education. ‘Support’ is not just a resource that international students may access at various moments in their educational sojourns. Instead, a commitment to care is infused throughout all processes related to international student mobility. The current focus on ‘student recruitment’, for example, is reframed as a process of embedding students within an international education landscape marked by reciprocity and mutuality. At the same time, the current attention toward caring strictly for international students is displaced in favour of configuring practices of relationality among the diversity of actors that constitute the sector. These include other human actors, such as education agents, migration consultants, educators, other staff members and peers, as well as the broader configuration of infrastructures, technologies, objects and spaces. Institutional support must consider how the relations between a diversity of actors – accommodation providers, transport operators, campuses and other spaces – for example, are conducive to care and wellbeing. Even prior to an international students’ physical arrival abroad, the international education sector seeks to embed international students within relations that are expressly trying to foster care and wellbeing.

Notwithstanding the potential of organising institutional support around the notion of wellbeing and care, institutions may be reluctant to do so (Forbes-Mewett & Nyland, 2013), and their efforts might work to create new tensions in international education. Creating more scope for student-led interventions might work to entrench divisions along lines of race, class, gender and ethnicity among the student body (Deuchar, 2022b; Madge et al., 2009). Similarly, as educators and other staff organise spaces of education in ways that promote care, they may inadvertently work to exclude international students by invoking forms of knowledge that are less relevant to a diverse set of students (Heng, 2017). This is especially the case as online teaching and learning might make it more difficult to facilitate relationships between students and to apprehend students’ needs (Gravett et al., 2021). A focus on care recognises these complexities yet resists offering ‘solutions’ (Mol, 2008). Just as health cannot be attained through biomedical interventions alone (Ostherr, 2020), wellbeing cannot be fostered strictly through ‘support’. And so in the same way that the medical humanities have highlighted the shortcomings of technical interventions that treat COVID-19 strictly as a disease (Ostherr, 2020), research has a critical role to play in informing how educational institutions practice care and pursue wellbeing.

Care as a mode of rethinking research regarding international students

A focus on care charts new directions in research about international students by highlighting the diversity of their social practices. Most educational research about international students has been preoccupied with the challenges they face (Khanal & Gaulee, 2019). This has been productive for highlighting the needs of international students and the shortcomings of educational institutions. But such ‘challenge centric’ research has had much less to say about the capacities and skills of international students, except with some consideration for how they ‘respond to hardships’. Such a framing conceptually locates students’ agency in the wake of hardship but not prior to or during it. Perhaps inadvertently, this research has reified an image of international students as a vulnerable and passive group in need of intervention (Tannock, 2018). A focus on care disrupts this tendency by highlighting the ways they actively create and participate in assembling configurations of care. International students are located as interdependent agents who develop vital ways of caring for each other and who create tools, resources and initiatives in the process (Jayadeva, 2020). This does not mean that research about international students resists analysing the hardships international students endure. But a focus on care locates them as agentive, dynamic, and creative amid that hardship.

An analytical focus on care and wellbeing also troubles a corresponding framing of international students that casts them as a privileged group who are interested strictly in their own gain (Brooks & Waters, 2011; Waters, 2012). This research has illuminated the ways that international students acquire capital through educational mobility, and how they deploy it to improve their job prospects abroad or at home (Lo, 2019). Yet it has downplayed the ways international students develop relations and practices marked by reciprocity, inclusion and mutuality (Cheng, 2016). The feminist underpinnings of theories of care unsettle the assumption that humans are motivated primarily by economic concerns. A focus on care and wellbeing thus prefigures a range of considerations that have not been probed in research about international education and international students (Cheng, 2016; Reddy, 2019; Yang, 2020). It offers conceptual starting points for theorising relational practices among international students and how these practices are configured in relation to other objects, bodies, infrastructures, spaces and technologies. And it considers how caring practices may be productive of virtual and physical spaces that are inclusive and democratic, but also how these might work to create new exclusions.

Pursuing these lines of inquiry demands the use of innovative and novel research methods. Moreover, because sociomaterial theories of care consider entities to be relational, they critique the assumption that researchers themselves are somehow separate from that which they are attempting to observe, describe, and apprehend (Gravett et al., 2021). Researchers analysing care and wellbeing might therefore make much greater use of methods such as autoethnography, walking interviews, participant observation, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork and digital ethnographies to produce knowledge (McLeod, 2011; Seale, 2013). These methods are suited to analysing the dynamics of care and wellbeing not only because of their ability to illuminate social practice, but also because they share with care an ethical commitment to dialogue, listening, trust and mutuality. These methods also enable researchers to render visible the diverse activities of international students and to highlight the contributions they make to educational institutions and societies more generally.

At the same time, researchers might productively investigate how sociomaterial assemblages of care are organised and shaped by other actors, through technologies, spaces, resources, and through flows of ideas, knowledges, and discourses (Ball, 2016). Scholarship might take into account how policies, programmes and initiatives create or inhibit students’ abilities to care and be cared for. It might also consider how university executives, educators and practitioners understand the care needs of international students, and how their understandings of care translate into practice. These lines of inquiry might generate new understandings of how axes of power and conflict affect international students. It might illuminate, for example, who tends to give care and who does not, and how such considerations are bound up with notions of class, gender, race and ethnicity (Raghuram, 2012). It might shed light on the forms of care that are needed but not received and reveal moments and spaces in which care is denied, or when caring relations fall apart. In this way, a focus on care and wellbeing offers several generative starting points for reanimating research about international students (Deuchar, 2022a) and illuminating the relational entanglements of which they are a part (Gravett & Ajjawi, 2022).

Conclusions

This article has considered the generative potential of care as a guiding principle for the transformation of international education. It has done so with a focus on Anglophone nations that accommodate the largest share of international students, including the United Kingdom, United States, Canada and Australia. Theorising care as a shifting sociomaterial assemblage, it has offered three sketches of how it might foster wellbeing and reshape international education policy, institutional support and research about international students. It comes at a time when the need to care more productively for humans and non-human actors, other species and the environment has arguably never been more pressing. It also comes at a time when policymakers, educational institutions and other agencies are giving more attention to notions of wellbeing and care. An opportunity exists, therefore, to carve out new directions in international education; not just to make the sector more viable and caring for all students, staff and nonhuman actors, but to rearticulate the very aims of international education. It is here that the latent and radical potential of care and wellbeing lies.

This article has suggested that a sociomaterial understanding of care is especially well suited to realising this potential. Theorising care in this way draws attention to everyday practices and relationships between actors, and how these are entangled with spaces, objects and other materialities and with power relations. Yet in its critique of how care is practiced and ordered it alludes to alternatives. In this sense, sociomaterialism is a practical philosophy. Approaching arrangements such as neoliberalism as profoundly unstable, a sociomaterial understanding of care seeks to tweak and tinker so that more ethical ways of teaching and learning are practiced, and that more caring forms of sociality are forged. It views such tinkering as an integral part of a project of transformation that seeks to rearticulate the trajectories of international education. At the same time, it rejects the conventional approach of situating care within ‘programs’ and considers instead how it might be threaded through and across all of the processes that constitute international education. Researching how international education might be transformed around the notion of care and wellbeing is thus a task imbued with both urgency and potential. What is at stake, and what is on offer, is the expansive promise of wellbeing itself: the promise of creating conditions in which humans and non-humans, other species and the environment might thrive.

Disclosure statement

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