Inbound Student Mobility to Study Destinations in the Global South: The Case of South Africa

• In Event: The Janus-Faced Nature of Higher Education Internationalization: Racialization, Xenophobia, and Ethnic Exclusion

Abstract

Although there is a great deal of literature on international student mobility, including robust coverage of the population’s marginalization and vulnerability in many institutions and countries, little attention has been paid to inbound student mobility to study destinations located in the global south. Similarly, little has been written that analyzes the agency of migrant students in making claims for rights under various identities and across various spatial scales (Robertson 2013). This paper shines a spotlight on how the emergence of post-apartheid South Africa as the most popular study destination in Africa has been accompanied by widespread and persistent anti-immigrant hostility. The paper draws on diverse non-national student narratives to show that xenophobia poses serious threats to the lives and livelihoods of those perceived as “outsiders”, including education and economic migrants (Misago et al. 2015).

The paper comes out of a larger institutional ethnography of efforts to expand, equalize, and internationalize higher education at one of South Africa’s top-ranked formerly white public university that has undergone intensive institutional expansion, transformation, and internationalization since the transition to democracy in 1994. Data consisted of more than 100 hours of audio-recorded interviews with 26 top and mid-level administrators, 15 faculty and staff members, 30 non-national students, and 19 black and white South African students; participant observations in on-campus and off-campus events and meetings; and review of institutional documents. Data was mainly analyzed by concept mapping, which involves sifting through research texts and document emerging patterns and interpretations in a series of visual, relational concepts (Butler-Kisber 2010).

The paper draws on Robertson’s (2013) discussion of the social and political consequences of the education-migration nexus in Australia in the context of internationalized university spaces created by the international education industry. Robertson posits that beyond the rights owed to them by educational institutions as consumers of education as product, the claims of international students are tied to overlapping identities and belonging within different networks, and so are also about their rights to the resources and spaces of these networks, which stretch within and beyond the university. This agency gestures towards a new politics premised on residence rather than nationality, or on a selective deployment of the two.

Unlike the networks of association formed by migrant students across spatial scales and intersecting identities in Robertson’s (2013) study, this paper describes the campus-contained, non-networked struggles that resulted from mobilization around the collective hardships that migrant students faced as non-nationals, and how they engaged with institutional discourses, practices, and systems. These struggles reflected the institutional segregation that existed between national and non-national students, which was fed by the continued legacies of apartheid segregationist tactics; South African politicians’ use of xenophobia as a key tool of division; and nationalized class, race, and gender dynamics. These findings have implications for how we understand and assess the purposes of public higher education and the sense of moving across borders in a host country that is caught up in internal battles that are simultaneously intertwined with deeply troubling histories at the regional level.

Author

• Upenyu Silas Majee, University of Wisconsin - Madison