Studying in Luxury: Town-Gown Relationships in Transnational Education

• In Event: Building Equity and Maintaining Community Across Global Higher Education

Abstract

For budget-constrained public universities, commercialized student housing has become a new way of attracting affluent foreign students and their much-needed tuition dollars. As college student populations become increasingly elite, high-end student housing development has not only expediated gentrification and intensified class divisions, but also revitalized historical legacies of racialization and racism. This transnational ethnography focuses on the co-construction of space, class, and race by investigating how the economic and social changes of one city influence the uneven class and racial relations of another. It shows that gentrification in the university town goes beyond individual pursuits of luxury housing, and is oftentimes facilitated by multiple institutional actors, such as the university, the real estate industry, and student organizations.

Author

• Shanshan Jiang, University of Wisconsin - Madison