How do student mobilities contribute to the transformation of students' home countries? A systematic review of literature in six languages

• In Event: Academic mobility: Acknowledging talents and knowledge for inclusion and diversity

Proposal

Background
International student mobilities (ISM) has been a vibrant and growing area of research in higher education studies. The bulk of the existing research on ISM examines students’ embodied experiences, their accumulation of various skills, and the development of civic consciousness and intercultural understanding (Chieffo & Griffiths, 2004; Chiocca, 2021; Gümüş et al., 2020; Oldac, 2021; Waters & Brooks, 2021). International students depart from the familiar to the unknown; their immediate communities change. Relatedness, similarities, and sameness become pronounced. Immigrants need to learn about unfamiliar realities and adjust by creating and sometimes reinventing their identities. International students may absorb novel knowledge and familiarize themselves with political practices which they can transmit to their home countries. Migrant returnees as agents of change may import new political values, knowledge of the day-to-day functioning of institutions, and expectations of how governments and citizens operate in the contexts of a different political culture (Chankseliani, 2018). Yet, only a few studies have examined the contributions of international student mobility to wider societal changes. In his book Thinking Politics, Jeffrey Puryear (1994) demonstrated the extraordinary role played by foreign-educated individuals in Chile's shift from authoritarian to democratic rule. He wrote that these individuals might 'produce ideologies, bringing the broad world of ideas and critical attitude to bear on their surroundings' (p. 8). Puryear referred to them as intellectuals and argued that the majority were social scientists educated at the graduate level in the USA and Europe. Foreign-educated intellectuals, in the words of O'Donnell & Schmitter (1986), who Puryear cites, contributed to the 'resurrection of civil society' that preceded the democratic transition. Subsequently, Spilimbergo (2009) showed that foreign-educated individuals promote democracy in their home country, but only if foreign education is acquired in democratic countries. Along similar lines, Atkinson (2010) used quantitative analysis to establish that greater participation in U.S. higher education by international students was associated with improving human rights records in the home countries of the students.
Some relatively recent literature in this area has looked at the social responsibility of mobile students and their contributions to the host country (Tran & Vu, 2016), as well as mobile students' contributions to their home countries (Campbell, 2017). This latter study looked at Moldova and Georgia to demonstrate the ways in which alumni of international scholarship programs contribute to their countries' development by working in government, in the private and non-profit sectors (Campbell, 2017). Another study in the post-Soviet context linked student mobility to the levels of attained democracy (Chankseliani, 2018), showing that the former Soviet countries with higher proportions of students studying in Europe or the United States have achieved higher levels of democratic development. In contrast, countries with higher proportions of students studying in the most popular, authoritarian destination - Russia - have attained significantly lower levels of democratic development. These studies offer important preliminary evidence on the ways in which the impact of international student mobility can go beyond the impact on an individual.
This study is the first of its kind as it offers a comprehensive overview of the existing knowledge on the wider societal impact of ISM. To be more specific, this paper reports the findings of an ongoing systematic literature review (SLR) addressing the following research question: how do student mobilities contribute to the transformation of students' home countries?

Methods
This SLR reviews journal articles and reviews published over the period of 1960 to 2022 and included in the following databases: Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, DialNet, CNKI, Cairn, Al Mandumah, and eLibrary.ru. The inclusion of publications in Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish is an important act of recognising knowledge produced in languages other than English on ISM and its impact on social transformations. To identify eligible studies that responded to the research question, we use the following criteria:
1. Relevance of the study topic to answer the SLR question - the publication goes beyond individual benefits and examines ISM’s contribution to the systemic transformations pertaining to various areas of development, including but not limited to poverty alleviation, achieving gender equality, ensuring justice and freedoms, improving health and education outcomes in students’ home countries.
2. Appropriateness of the research design and analysis used for answering the research question.
3. Soundness of the study (internal methodological coherence) – the team looks at internal validity/credibility, external validity/transferability, reliability/dependability, and objectivity/confirmability. This does not assume creating a hierarchy of evidence but ensuing that studies meet basic criteria for research rigour, within their own epistemological and ontological assumptions.
The publications identified in the initial search (1521 altogether) are reviewed for inclusion by two of the seven authors each. For each study deemed eligible for inclusion following this screening process, a table describing each included study will be prepared with the details of authorship, methodology, findings, context, and critical reflections on the rigour of the design. This file will be analysed thematically, focusing on key areas of development, types of contributions, regions, methodologies, and diversity of knowledges produced in different parts of the world.

Contribution
This SLR will offer a comprehensive understanding of the scale, scope, key themes, and methodology of research on ISM and world development. Studies included in the SLR provide evidence on the links between ISM and world development in different areas. The conference paper will highlight the importance of including different language databases in systematic reviews as articles from non-English speaking countries, especially non-Western countries, provide us with valuable postcolonial accounts of ISM and social development. Clearly, as we notice the association between ISM and social reproduction in our search results, more rigorous research is needed to examine the influence of international students’ social class to their contributions to systemic social transformations.

Funding
This study forms a part of a research project ‘International Student Mobilities and World Development,’ sponsored by the US State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

Authors

• Zhe Wang, University of Oxford

• Maia Chankseliani, University of Oxford

• Ilka Vari-Lavoisier, University of Oxford