International(-ised) Students in East and Southeast Asia: Critical Perspectives

2022-04-13

In this volume, we focus on East and South East Asia as the regions with the greatest diversity of transnational and international educational partnerships (Universities UK, 2021), and consequently with the greatest diversity of narratives around the students that take part in them. Moreover, it is becoming more and more apparent that regions such as China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea are amongst the rising powers and are eager global players in education, and whilst still being major sending countries, they are now also increasingly important student destinations.  Others in the region, like Brunei, may only begin to develop their transnational education, but have huge national investment behind it, so it will be very interesting to see what narratives around students emerge from these contexts. And now, the global Covid-19 pandemic, which bought the world to a stop in 2020-21and now specifically to the Eastern and Southeastern region where some regions have once again gone into full lock-down.  The physical movements of students in these regions have been stopped and stalled, but that does not mean that new forms of movement – virtual/ideational - have not been facilitated through transnational educational partnerships, using the new infrastructures that keep students moving whilst suspended in place. All this makes East and South East Asia an ideal context for the aims of this book (more) which are:

  1. To explore student counterflows to what we are used to in terms of traditional international student mobility caused by the specific international/transnational context of East and South East Asia
  2. To synthesise and critically evaluate new narratives about international/ transnational students and how they are associated with these counterflows
  3. To conceptualise a definition of an international (-ised) student, to invite readers to think with a phrase ‘international(-ised), and to evaluate the use of this phrase against more traditional student narratives 

For questions, contact

 Dr Aneta Hayes: a.m.hayes@keele.ac.uk

Dr Sihui Wang: s.wang@keele.ac.uk