Mobility as Assemblage: Women's Experiences of Crossing Borders to Do Doctorates

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 1
  In Roundtable Session: Getting to the Station: Mobility, Community, and Collaboration in Higher Education Research

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to uncover the meanings and implications of the mobility of a group of Vietnamese women who decided to do doctorates in Australia. Drawing on the Deleuzian concept of assemblage, the data revealed that mobility as assemblage embraced heterogeneous elements associated with global and national neoliberalism in higher education, historical, and cultural forces of gender and nationality in which the mobile women aspired for educational, social, personal, and professional becomings. The paper invites the collaboration of higher education practitioners and policy makers to rethink the subject largely defined from economic perspective in policies and discourses associated with mobility of international doctoral students.

Author

• Xuan Pham, Monash University