Mobility justice in study abroad: Ideations of travel and the structures that bind them

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Creating Space: Student Perspectives, Inclusivity, and Access in International Education

Proposal

This paper examines the study abroad experiences of minoritized first-generation, low-income students. It complicates hegemonic understandings of study abroad programming in U.S. higher education through analyses of study abroad participant counternarratives that illuminates their mobility histories and identifies the structural dynamics that constrain marginalized student participation. In doing so, I amplify the voices of a population that remains largely absent from study abroad literature and forward an understanding of how mobility regimes function in one educational realm. In contrast to deficit driven discourse in study abroad literature, participant narratives display mobility as the product of historically differentiated mobilities and unequal social locations.

Sheller’s (2018) mobility justice framework is productive for examining differential mobilities in study abroad because there are minimal efforts dedicated to understanding the complexities and unevenness, particularly participants’ mobility prior to studying abroad. This includes differing access to policies, geography, infrastructure, and materialities. Disparities in study abroad across social groups have yet to be examined in relation to this mobility gap and the regimes that govern them. This paper outlines how marginalized study abroad participants experienced differential mobilities prior to study abroad, how these mobility inequalities impact their ability to even imagine themselves as participants, and how the discursive and structural dimensions of immobility obstruct and shape study abroad participation. Through participant counternarratives, this study finds that students’ differentiated mobilities affect and influence their mobility imaginaries and possibilities of travel.

I conceptualize study abroad as a phenomenon enmeshed in the broader politics of educational mobility. Disparities in study abroad are most often explained through a deficit rhetoric, which promoted the idea that low-income, first generation minoritized students fail to gain access to study abroad as a result of deficiencies that characterize marginalized social groups. This paper rejects hegemonic deficit arguments. I consider dominant discourses as elements of mobility injustice and draw critical attention to oft-hidden infrastructures and systems of governance that have contributed to the uneven mobilities of study abroad participants.

The field of study abroad is premised on assumptions of mobility and of its educational and intercultural benefits. These assumptions, however, are heavily classed and racialized, and are built upon unrecognized colonial relations of power that restrict the mobility of intersectionally marginalized groups. Colonial power relations facilitate the broad movements of those who have the privilege of political membership in countries of the Global North. This privilege of political membership, regulated through citizenship (Benhabib, 2004), situates citizens of countries of the Global North as ideal subjects for study abroad recruitment, participation, and celebrations of the ostensibly universally-experienced benefits of study abroad participation. Dominant market-based logics conceptualize these privileged subjects as those who can bring the highest return on investment. In turn, those who lack the privilege of political membership and its corresponding liberties for international movement only figure within social constructions of study abroad as deficient subjects who are not worth the investments needed to enable their participation. Their deficiencies, and not the structural barriers to their participation, some have argued, account for their absence in study abroad (Thomas, 2013).

Prevalent assumptions within the field do not reflect the alternate histories and differential capacities of mobility in higher education. By centering mobility justice in study abroad we acknowledge that there is clearly a politics to movement, meaning, and practice (Cresswell, 2008) that governs who gains access to or is excluded from study abroad, and shapes the dominance of some ideas and depictions of study abroad over others. In the context of study abroad, understanding the politics of mobility elicits the questions: Who takes international travel as matter of fact, who presumes it to be possible? How do immigration regimes differentially impact movement? Which groups are socially constructed as the subjects of autonomous and leisurely travel and whose movement only takes place in the service of economic exploitation and displacement? Embedded in these questions is the acknowledgement that mobilities have distinct and unequal histories.

As much as they have been underexamined, the barriers to study abroad mobility are not just physical and structural. Hegemonic narrative constructs of study abroad include: 1) depictions of study abroad as a consumer good; 2) homogenized notions of the benefits of study abroad; and 3) framings of those who are barred from participating abroad as deficient. These hegemonic constructs are part of the politics of mobility as they limit higher education opportunities to specifically mobile, affluent, white, cisgender women, traditional-aged prospective study abroad participants. The hegemony of these societal ideas forward understandings of who can, who should, and who does study abroad. Simplistic and universalist assumptions about the benefits of studying abroad neglect the life stories and lived experiences of participants prior to their study abroad experience. Mobilities are, in various ways, ‘channeled, tracked, controlled, governed, under surveillance and unequally striated by gender, race, ethnicity, class, caste, color, nationality, age, sexuality, disability, etc., which are all in fact experienced as effects of uneven mobilities’ (Sheller, 2018a, p. 10). Said differently, the experiences of these participants underscore the hierarchical nature of mobility.

Recognizing that mobility is an unequally distributed resource, I asked participants to reflect on their experiences of mobility, their dreams of travel, their communities, and experiences of (im)mobility prior to studying abroad. This paper departs from an examination of the ideational obstructions to mobility participants experience, as they are unable to imagine a mobility that is not completely determined by external forces (i.e., migration due to displacement, mobility as a means to meet economic needs). What I am terming ideational obstructions refers to the dominant ideologies and discourses that obstruct participants from conceptualizing an atmosphere of place beyond their immediate circumstances. I find that ideational obstructions to mobility bring to bear a lack of imaginative travel of ‘inner mobility’ for participants, defined as a participant’s ability to imagine travel as a possibility (Urry, 2010, p. 348). I then present participant narratives that identify the structural obstructions to mobility that dominant discourses in the field fail to consider when examining study abroad.

Author

• Rosa Maria Acevedo, The University of Texas at Austin