Rethinking the International Student Market: A Relational Perspective

• In Event: 16.058 - Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: 16.058-3 - Differing Perspectives on Global Higher Education (2)

Abstract

This paper examines the transnational lives of international graduate students at a large state university. Using relational analysis, I demonstrate how kinship networks play an active role in the daily lives of international students and are central to making international study an ongoing possibility. Families do so by absorbing many of the economic, cultural, and social costs and risks of international study and by reconfiguring roles, identities, and intimacy within the network, changes which themselves entail costs and risks. By placing international graduate study in its relational and transnational contexts, it is possible to reconceptualize the behaviors of institutions in the international student market in ways that reveal the hidden relationships between schools and the families of international students.

Author

• Raymond Kirk Anderson, University of Wisconsin - Madison