From Cultural Resources to Public Diplomats: Middle Eastern International Students’ Perspectives on Internationalization

• In Event: International student pathways, roles, and outcomes

Proposal

Overview

As universities continue to recruit growing numbers of international students, they do so under the belief that the presence of these students on campuses helps to facilitate intercultural/global awareness and understanding. However, little research has looked at how international students understand their cultural and global influence on US campuses. Therefore, the presented study investigates the ways in which Middle Eastern international students make meaning of and understand their identity and presence on US campuses, particularly in terms of influencing how others view the region of the Middle East.* By conceptualizing these international students as public diplomats**, this study seeks to illuminate both how Middle Eastern students see themselves in terms of being public diplomats and how their perceptions influence their campus engagement and interaction.

Methodology and Methods

To move beyond approaching international students as cultural resources, my dissertation conceptualizes international students as public diplomats, whose interactions with their campus community is informed by their personal identity, perceptions, and motivations. Driven by an interdisciplinary framework that draws upon concepts of citizen diplomacy, social identity development, and otherness, I use interpretive qualitative methods to answer two fundamental questions: 1) in the context of internationalization, how do Middle Eastern international students understand and make meaning of their presence on US campuses? and 2) how does the way in which students understand their own identity influence their campus interactions and engagement?
The methods employed for this study include focus groups with 24-36 Middle Eastern international students and semi-structured interviews with 8-10 of those students. The participants in this study consist of Middle Eastern international undergraduate students at a large, research university in the U.S. Participants are recruited using a snowball sampling approach and selected based on the diversity of their sex, nationality, and year in school. Focus groups and individual interviews are coded using a constant comparative method approach, where the information gathered is coded and analyzed at the same time in order to develop concepts from the data (Taylor & Bogdan, 1998). Two cycles of formal coding are conducted, the first being descriptive in nature and the second seeking to code the relationships and connections between the initial codes (Bazeley, 2004).

Background/Problem Statement

Over the last two decades, nearly all major US universities have initiated processes of internationalization in an effort to respond to the growing influence of globalization and to remain leaders in the vastly competitive space of higher education. As part of this competitive race, many universities have turned to recruiting and admitting a growing number of international students, particularly from “developing” regions of the world, such as the Middle East (IIE, 2017). For these global universities, the motivation for increasing the enrollment of international students is not just economical, but also signifies progress towards the goal of educating the next generation of global-citizens – equally as prepared to compete in the global marketplace as to play a role in shaping a more peaceful and understanding world (Altbach & Knight, 2007).
As the number of international students in the US has increased, so too have the expectations for them to be public diplomats: individuals who play a role in facilitating international understanding, connections, and awareness. Yet, these expectations are rarely communicated directly to international students (Urban & Palmer, 2014). As a result, the individuality and agency of these students has been overshadowed and replaced by a conceptualization of international students as cultural resources, whose presence alone indicates successful internationalization (Larsen, 2016). This conceptualization overlooks the complexity and hinders the potential of international student contributions to US campuses by ignoring the importance of recognizing these students as “active subjects and interpreters of their own mobility, rather than viewing them as objects of study” (Larsen, 2016). This approach is reflected in research on international students, the majority of which explores the experiences of these students within their campus environments, rather than their role and contributions as part of larger internationalization efforts (Vasilopoulos, 2016).

Theoretical Framework

As a study that seeks to draw connections between individuals and international diplomacy, my framework is one that seeks to bridge the global and local by demonstrating the relationship between the micro (individuals), meso (university), and macro (international relations) levels of analysis in this particular context. To do so, my approach to this topic is guided by three major theoretical areas: first, I use citizen diplomacy (Bellamy & Weinberg, 2008) to illustrate the role that individuals play in international relations; second, I employ a Social Identity Approach (Mavor, Platow, & Bizumic, 2017) to demonstrate the relevance and role of individual identity within internationalization outcomes; and third, I integrate the notion of Otherness (Said, 1978) to illuminate the collective experiences of Middle Eastern students.

Contributions/Significance

As Mathews-Aydinli (2016) points out, at a time when student mobility “is at its highest and there is a growing acknowledgement of the potential for such exchanges to contribute to intercultural understanding, and, thus, public diplomacy, research on the topic is limited.” This reality is perhaps most significant for Middle Eastern students, whose presence on US campuses is of particular consequence given the historic and current geo-political and public opinion tensions that define the US-Middle East relationship. In such an environment, it is not enough for universities to be content with bringing students together and assuming that positive outcomes will result. In order to improve the outcomes of international student programs, and realize their full potential, international students’ perspectives must begin to be included in the design of internationalization initiatives. As such, my findings not only advance knowledge on international students, and Middle Eastern students in particular, but provide guidance to administrators and policy makers on program design and development. Ultimately, this research advocates for an approach to international student programs that appreciates international students as active, rather than passive, contributors to internationalization.


* For the purpose of this study, the Middle East is inclusive of Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Pakistan.

** I refer here to the idea of public, or more specifically, citizen diplomats, defined as individuals who interact with foreign individuals/groups as representatives of their country or region, whether inadvertently or by design, and pave the way for improved diplomatic relations between countries.

Author

• William Geibel, University of California, Los Angeles