Indebted Mobilities: Indian Youth, Migration, and the Internationalizing University

Group Submission Type: Book Launch

Description of Session

Making a meaningful transdisciplinary contribution across the fields of international education, critical university studies, and migration studies, Indebted Mobilities is an ethnographic rendering of the racial, gender, and class formations that emerge from the encounters between Indian student-migrants and the “internationalizing” university. Portrayals of student-migrants as merely economic subjects critical to the revenue generation schemes of educational institutions have become especially prevalent over the course of the last couple of decades as institutions of higher education across the United States, and the world, declare they are “going global,” a neoliberal trend that is now often referred to as internationalization. In recent years, India consistently has served as one of the primary sources of student-migrants, and the United States has been their key destination. Assumed to be rationally calculating, ambitious, and globally-minded consumers of higher education pursuing the choices afforded by internationalization, Indian migrant youth enrolling in professional fields easily embody an idealized migrant subject in the contemporary period, an example of neoliberal globalization’s success story. However, this book’s analysis of Indian student-migrants studying at a public university in New York takes as its point of departure that such idealizing masks crucial stories of longings and struggle that are formative to the educational circuits of neoliberal empire. Contending that US exceptionalism configures the conditions of aspiration embedded in the global educational imaginaries of Indian student-migrants, the chapters examine how their migratory lives are marked by considerations of labor, post-9/11 surveillance, and other modes of exclusion that come to bear on the racial and class locations of these young people. Further, the gendered contours of these migrations illustrate that the professional fields important to the global knowledge economy continue to be dominated by men and are often read as implicitly culturally masculine. For this reason, the book attends particularly to the experiences of Indian migrant men. An exploration of their encounters reveals how educational migratory routes are sites of Indian middle-class men’s desires to become modern “men of the world,” a promised possibility they imagine to be attached to the future returns of an American education. Yet, these desires are entangled in particular webs of obligation formed through market-based student loans, kinship ties, as well as nation-state interests. Such obligations translate into a cultural logic of indebtedness, a notion of owing and being owed that shapes the sensibilities of Indian middle-class migrant youth whose presence on campus is simultaneously situated as indispensable and disposable to the internationalizing university. Drawn in by the promise of Indian modern selfhood, these young people enter the transnational educational sphere and are confronted with the intensified unevenness and uncertainties accompanying the global commodification of higher education. This book underscores how the long-existing ties between higher education, racial capitalism, and US global hegemony are important to understanding the lifeworlds of Indian student-migrants, central figures in a moment that renders “going global” an essential modern facet of university life.

Sub Unit

• Pre-Conference Workshops, Book launches, and Visual Art Exhibits / Book Launch

Chair

• Lisa Unangst, SUNY Empire State University

Book Launch Presenter

• Susan Thomas, Syracuse University

Discussants

• Jamie Lew, Rutgers University-Newark

• Sangeeta G. Kamat, Univ of Massachusetts Amherst

• Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher, University of Pennsylvania