Written by Jenna Mittelmeier (University of Manchester, RIS co-founder)
As we approach the end of 2025, I am pleased to reflect on what a great year it has been for Research with International Students (RIS). It has now been two years since we first released our book, which started this organisation as a space to continue conversations about developing a more critical and ethical research field. 2025 has been a year of expansion for RIS, as we were originally led by just a few people but have now grown to a more formalized board of 12 members with varied roles and contributions. I’ve really enjoyed working with this new RIS board and seeing their energy and enthusiasm for developing new activities.
Thank you so much to everyone who has contributed to RIS this year, joined an event, or accessed our website of resources – of which there are many of you. This year, for example, our website was visited by over 15,000 unique users from 149 countries! To me, this speaks to our ethos of being a free and open scholarly community for all. Some of our most popularly accessed resources this year include our Theoretical Framework Bank, ‘Anti-glossary’ of contested terms, and reading lists.
I wanted to end the year by spotlighting some of my favorite contributions from RIS members this year. Without further ado:
Our new preferred publishing outlet: the Journal of Global Higher Education
Alongside the Critical Internationalization Studies Network (CISN), RIS has endorsed the new open access journal, the Journal of Global Higher Education (JGHE), as our preferred publishing outlet. JGHE officially launched in July 2025 with its first solicited issue and has been open for submissions since September. Since then, the journal has received dozens of submissions and will be publishing its first new articles soon, following peer review and copy-editing processes. We endorse JGHE as it is an open access and scholarly-owed publishing collective which seeks to purposefully disrupt academic publishing models, which aligns with our values of free and accessible scholarship.
New ‘Research Briefs’ video series
This year, we started a new video series on our YouTube Channel called ‘Research Briefs’. These videos are short, 15-minute (or so) introductions by the authors of a recently published research article. So far, we have published eight Research Briefs, coordinated and curated by Ying Yang. Here are a few of my personal favorites from 2025:
- Nashid Nigar on ‘Rethinking diverse academic cultures in Australian Higher Education’
- Mianmian Fei on ‘Racial learning of international students in the United States’
- Asuka Ichikawa and Sarang Kim on ‘Critical considerations for intercultural sensitivity development’
RIS blog posts
We published 23 blog posts this year, with our members adding over 22,000 words to our website. Our blog posts are now curated by our new Blog Coordinator Yifan Liu. This has been a really interesting space for hearing from new voices on topics related to international students. Here are a few of our most read and accessed this year:
- Trang Nguyen: Rethinking critically about ‘global citizenship’ in research and practice with international students
- Haishan Yang and Sanfeng Miao: Care, compliance, and the cost of belonging: What institutional crisis responses reveal about international student support
- Bowen Zhang: Navigating identity: How international students balance cultural heritage and university policies
- Rammohan Khanapurkar: The intersectional dialectics of ‘international-student-parent’
Discipline guides
We have continued to develop our Discipline Guide series, which aims to encourage more interdisciplinary thinking within research with international students. This year we added two to the series:
- Josef Ploner on ‘Tourism Studies’
- Hongping Zhang and Pii-Tuulia Nikula on ‘Sustainability’
We aim to increase the number of Discipline Guides published in the future, so please do reach out if you are interested in writing one.
Events and online conference
We developed a wide range of online webinars this year, including the RIS Conference 2025 which took place last March. You can find recordings of all our events and conference presentations on our YouTube channel. This has also included our Online Writing Retreats and events led by our new RIS ECR Network. Here are few recordings that I personally feel pushes the boundaries of discussions in our field:
- ‘Navigating intersectionality, policy, and activism: Queer international students in the Global North’ – a panel led by Lisa Brunner with contributions by Anne Campbell, Mohit Dudeja, Fatemeh Gharibi, and Tori Yang
- ‘Implied by uncertain: Capturing international students in gray spaces’ by Shannon Hutcheson
- ‘Engaging an equity-driven approach to research with international students’ by Christina Yao and Chrystal George Mwangi
- ‘Beyond the reading: Students we label as ‘international’’ with Ramzi Merabet
We have an exciting schedule of events in the planning stages for 2026, but welcome suggestions from anyone who would like to speak or share their work with the network.
In summary and looking ahead
Together these events and resources highlight how RIS continues to grow and contribute to scholarly conversations. With the growth of our board and through welcoming so many new members into leadership roles for RIS, we have turned our attention this year towards formalizing some of our processes and developing systems that support our network’s longevity. This has been a helpful process of reflecting on ‘what does RIS mean?’ and ‘what is our role in the scholarly community?’. This continues to be questions driving our work into 2026 and which we welcome your feedback on.
We have many exciting plans for 2026 and more announcements to come for events and new publication opportunities with us. We look forward to continuing to engage with our lovely (and growing) community of critical scholars!