International or international(-ised) students? Insights from continental Europe

KEYWORDS:

• International students
• Europe
• constructions
• internationalisation
• internationalised experiences

We were very pleased to curate this special issue on constructions of international students across Europe. We called for papers focusing on continental Europe, as whilst there now exists quite a large body of literature on representations of international students in countries such as the US, the UK, and Australia (e.g. Lee & Rice, 2007; Walker, 2014; Zhang & Tu, 2019), we wanted to expand this literature by focusing on international students in continental Europe. We considered this important, as an attempt to destablilise the dominance of English-majority speaking destinations in shaping thinking and scholarship, as well as unpack different political dynamics and tensions emerging in relation to international students.

This is the first contribution of our special issue; the second revolves around a definition of internationalisation and the ‘international student’, and the uses of these definitions. There is in general a rapid expansion in literature on internationalisation, but much of it focuses on ‘international student experiences’ – weakly and broadly conceptualised (Deuchar, 2022). There is, however, much less critical investigation of the structural influences of policy, practices, and representations in constructing the international student and shaping their experiences (Lipura & Collins, 2020). The papers in this special issue, therefore, engage more directly with these influences, and suggests that the concept of ‘internationalised’, rather than ‘international’ students may be a more appropriate one. This enables the examination of internationalisation as a process that creates ‘internationalised’ experiences (in the same sense as students’ experiences can be racialised, classed, and gendered). Understood in this sense, we point to how students described by the authors in this special issue are internationalised into specific experiences of education. This is because their experiences are not defined by virtue of their international students’ status per se. Rather, their experiences are shaped by how this status is ascribed with privilege or disadvantage in different contexts. Just as gender, racial, and class identities are constructed through key economic and political structures shaping education and resource distribution (e.g. Omi & Winant, 2015), so too is the international student identity and experience. What is critical in our contribution via this special issue – is a specific focus on how the social ascription of international-ness operates in a similar way to these other structuring categorisations.

Our authors, however, clearly show that it is not purely the fact that students are international which creates hierarchical relations between them and other students. Rather, it is how the international students’ status is ‘patterned’ into the social, political, and institutional systems – this is what structures and maintains their differing experiences. This patterning, reflected in constructions of international students which the authors shed light on, gives their ‘international student’ status meaning(s), which in turn shape their experiences of education abroad. These meanings can include deficit narratives, position them as ‘ideal immigrants’, view them as global ‘ambassadors’, and many categorisations that are shaped by different national, regional, and local influences. Thus, in a context where international students are understood through a deficit lens, and viewed with suspicion – as, for instance, migrants with questionable motives – students will be subject to a regime of surveillance through institutionally mandated attendance policies and an active misrecognition of their epistemic contributions in the classroom. Alternatively, in a context where international students are constructed as ‘top talent’, and valued contributors, they are likely to have more positive experiences. The contributions in this special issue, therefore, demonstrate how the discursive frames around international students vary in different national and local contexts, and how these shape the processes and procedures that structure international student experiences (i.e. making these experiences international-ised).

Starting with the paper by Olenina, Bamberger, and Mun, who used HESA (Higher Education Statistics Agency) data to analyse the composition of doctoral students in the UK, the authors argue that marketisation of internationalisation of higher education (HE) ‘results in limited social diversity in the international doctoral student body’. Such findings show how well-meaning imperatives behind internationalisation which emphasise social justice and epistemic inclusion of international students (Brooks, 2018; Hayes, 2019) are challenged by neoliberal and commercialised HE systems and its associated funding regimes that limit the social composition of international doctoral students to those who are: academically capable; and either financially able to pay international tuition fees and subsistence in the UK (for them and their families) or capable of securing overseas funding, primarily from national governments.

As international doctoral students rely on scholarships from national governments, the ambition of internationalisation of education lauded by so many (promoting equity of knowledge production through research engagement of international students – Adriansen, 2020) as is limited, as funding schemes determine who and what disciplines are appropriate to undertake postgraduate research in abroad.

The paper by Kmiotek-Meier and Powell, critiquing the Luxembourgish policy of compulsory international student mobility (ISM), also points to understandings of internationalisation as a process that produces and embeds hierarchies by ‘bolstering elite European networks’ and ‘reproduc(ing) social stratification in Luxembourg’. The latter point emerges from the authors’ analysis that due to insufficient state allowances to cover the full costs of studying abroad, ‘the group going abroad remains socially selective’. Those Luxembourgish students who can be mobile for their studies then gain access to privileged student circles abroad (Cercles d’Etudiants Luxembourgeois). Thus, Luxembourgish students do not only become international, in the traditional sense of undertaking a degree or semester exchange abroad, but they also become international(−ised) – a function strongly promoted by the ideological foundations of ISM policy in Luxembourg. The policy seeks to construct a specific international student identity, which the authors argue ‘can be understood as key to elite formation and socially-stratified reproduction’. Of note is that contrary to the Luxembourgish policy discourse which promotes the compulsory ISM as a strategy for increasing human capital development, the policy itself is seen by the Luxembourgish students as infringing on their autonomy and ability to make choices around their study paths. In short, it violates ‘the expectation of autonomy placed in the student status’. Finally, the envisaged cultural exchange that this enforced mobility promotes – a founding principle of internationalisation within higher education (e.g. Fabricius et al., 2017) – is also challenged by the way the ISM policy is implemented, since ‘offered destinations are often geographically and culturally close to Luxembourg and in most cases Luxembourgish students are the primary peer group abroad’.

Cultural exchanges as a founding principle of internationalisation of education are also challenged when entangled with a global crisis, such as Covid-19. This has been supported by a Twitter analysis by Mittelmeier and Cockayne in this special issue. In total, 6,501 public tweets depicting international students posted between December 2019 ((when the first cases of COVID-19 were reported by WHO) and April 2020 ((the midpoint of the subsequent semester across universities) were analysed. Mittelmeier and Cockayne show that international students are depicted as disease carries, with individuals ‘staying away’ from international students and understanding themselves to be ‘at greater risk due to proximity to international students’. These depictions shifted over the time analysed, towards greater empathy and support for these students following university closures. In their analysis, the authors identified calls for international students to return to their home countries, and for their visas to be revoked, as part of ‘a renewed focus on supporting home students’. The global pandemic therefore becomes a temporal lens that ‘demonstrates how representations of minoritised student groups can be rapidly shaped in response to changes in public discourses during global crises’.

Berg’s paper examines shifting organisational responses to refugees at the time of an international refugee crisis. Applying a systems theoretical framework, Berg’s analysis reveals that refugee students at German higher education organisations (HEO) become ‘discursively and formally differentiated from international students’ in response to changing functional needs of the organisations. An analysis of discursive representations illustrates that due to funding opportunities, refugee students had to be conceived of as a homogenous group (‘entity’) ‘in order to become formally addressable by HEOs’. Because of these functional needs, Berg finds that refugees’ ‘level of skill and preparation for German higher education is questioned, even explicitly, in comparison to other groups of international students’ – this allows institutions to formalise respective support structures for refugee students and to access funding to establish these structures.

Such framing challenges epistemic recognitions of international students and their heterogeneity (Lomer & Mittelmeier, 2021; Song & McCarthy, 2018).

Framing international students as a homogeneous group challenges their potential for agency, a theme addressed by Oleksiyenko and Shchepetylnykova which illustrates how complex institutional, political, and discursive circumstances affect the degree to which international students are able to exercise agency. Focusing on the Ukraine – before the Russian invasion in February 2022 – the authors analyse the constructions of international students’ agency (defined using Emirbayer and Mische [1998, p. 962], as ‘the realization of selfhood, motivation, will, purposiveness, intentionality, choice, initiative, freedom, and creativity’). The authors’ analysis examines differences in the agency afforded international students between the two types of universities – those with a pro-Russian tradition and those aiming to liberate themselves from the Russian influence. At the former, international students are constructed as ‘units’ and ‘subjects’ who need support with ‘their effective adaptation to local environments and cultures’. In the latter institutions, international students are positioned as critical ‘allies’ that can help universities break from Russian domination. Whilst that latter positioning appears at times to enable the students to play an agentic role in transforming post-colonial universities, the authors highlight that ‘the enhanced agency of international students in Ukraine largely depends on the ability of universities to depart from archaic styles of administrative-bureaucratic communication and control’. This point has relevance beyond Eastern Europe, or ex-Soviet states, given the prevalence of heavy administrative structures in shaping international students’ positionalities across many contexts.

Civera, Meoli and Paelari examine motivations and drivers behind student choice of host universities and locations. The analysis of OECD mobility data by Civera et al. emphasises that the ‘experiential dimension [re decision making about destinations of mobility] becomes primary and in some cases overriding’ other motivations that may shape student choices about country of education, such as prestige of universities or future career plans. Decisions that students make about their mobility are linked to individual student geo-political circumstances. Thus, Civera et al. argue that ‘countries aimed at attracting international students should pay particular attention to the different motivations and characteristics of international students’ they receive, rather than simply assuming that they are ‘supplicants of the prestigious education systems’. Such assumptions ‘influence how they are “treated” by the country and by the people in these countries’. The influence of these assumptions on students’ ‘treatment’ brings to mind arguments that how international students experience their education abroad cannot be ascribed to their characteristics as international students per se – rather, it is the socio-political contexts of countries of origin and student destinations, and the wealth and geographical locations of these countries that plays a role in their experiences and becomes a ‘reference point’ for understanding these experiences.

International or internationalised students – developing commonly accepted meanings of internationalisation

The above papers prompt a critical reflection around conceptualising internationalisation within education and require an examination of how the term ‘internationalised student’ could more accurately capture the processes at work than the more traditional definition of an ‘international student’.

Internationalisation has emerged in the papers as a process that is quite opposite in meaning and scope to that initially conceived of by seminal work (by De Wit, 2002; Hudzik, 2014; Jones, 2007; Knight, 2004, 2013) – which is underpined by globalist ideals. These ideals promote the desire for equality of access, outcomes, voices, and epistemologies of knowledge; that through cultural exchanges there will be a broadening of horizons and enrichment of student educational journeys. Recent work has critiqued such aspirations, see, for instance, Waters (2012); Madge et al. (2009); Ilieva et al. (2014); Lomer and Mittelmeier (2021); Spangler and Adriansen (2021); Mulvey (2022). The papers in this special issue continue along this trajectory, persuasively showing the divide between these ideals and how students are internationalised – i.e. how their international student status (i.e. studying abroad, often at an increased cost, on occasions supported by national or international funding) has been used as a reference to locate them in state and institutional activities, ‘life-chances’ and identities that disadvantage them. The analyses in this issue’s papers show that, as a result, students’ experiences are opposite to celebrating their presence, broadening horizons, and pluralism in higher education. Internationalisation viewed from this perspective emerges as politicised and institutionalised, as well as localised through regulations, policy, and funding discourses. Such understandings of internationalisation require more critical scholarship as critical understandings of internationalisation are still marginalised (Mwangi et al., 2018; Stein, 2019).

The authors of the papers in this special issue undertake such scholarship, which prompts understandings of internationalisation to be understood as processes that disadvantage and segregate (Olenina et al.), label, and homogenise (Berg), infringe on autonomy (Kmiotek-Meier and Powell) and as placing limits on students’ agency (Oleksiyenko and Shchepetylnykova). In the context of this special issue, internationalisation also limits the broadening of horizons and cultural exchanges that are possible (Kmiotek-Meier and Powell, Civera et al), but also when international students are scapegoated as negatively affecting the outcomes for national peers (Mittlemeier and Cockayne). The papers have shown that there are both spatial and temporal dimensions to these effects.

The above elements operate similarly to other processes that disadvantage people within education, through the ascription of characteristics which then racialise, class, and gender subjects. In this special issue, the ascribed characteristics were revealed through studying representations of international students across Europe. We cannot understand how, for example, international students experience ISM, without understanding how compulsory ISM policy rationales shape the meaning of what it means to be an international student. International students’ characteristics cannot therefore be studied without a reference, as in their own right, these characteristics do not ‘do’ anything to international students – it is rather when they are invoked in discursive representations that they signify or order international students and thus shape practices that determine their experiences.

The same applies to the students themselves. The characteristics that make them international students alone do not play a role in how they eventually experienced the education received abroad. The papers in this special issue have shown, rather, that it is the ways in which those characteristics are framed and communicated to others or the students themselves that created conditions for how they experiences this type of internationalisation within education. In that sense, the students are shaped into these experiences – i.e. ‘internationalised’ by the ways they are portrayed – by policy, nation states, by other students and by themselves.

This special issue therefore represents an important shift in the focus taken in this field of study. Historically, and still prominent in many parts of the subfield on international students, there remains a residual focus on untheorized ‘experiences’ (Mittelmeier et al., in press), which, when combined with dominant deficit narratives, has the net effect of constructing international student experiences as the responsibility of the students themselves or the products of their personal, cultural or ethnic characteristics. Contemporary critical scholarship takes insights from the wider sociological literature relating to intersectionality, critical race theory, gender studies, and decolonisation and applies these to the study of international students (e.g. Hayes et al., 2022). The contributions in this special issue feed into this wider move towards research that examines what structures international student experience, asking why processes, policies, procedures, and practices organise international student experiences as they do in specific contexts. This focus on the ascribed identity moves responsibility away from individuals, onto the institutions, policies, and discourses. As such, it represents an important direction and reference point for future research in the subfield of internationalisation of education and international student research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.