An Infrastructural Perspective on International Students Navigating the Housing Crisis in Scotland

26th August 2025 (Tuesday)
14:00 BST (time zone converter)
Online via Zoom (registration required)

The session focuses on the role of the housing sector as a ‘migration infrastructure’ which mediates the experiences of internationally mobile students. Drawing on survey and interview data collected in Scotland’s two largest cities, Glasgow and Edinburgh, the study repositions housing access as a core component of arrival or migration infrastructures, an area largely overlooked in research on international student mobility. The session frames housing policies, markets, and brokers as infrastructures that play a productive (as opposed to mediating) role in students’ mobility trajectories. Empirically, the study documents how actors such as landlords, regulatory infrastructures such as national or university housing policies, non-profit services such as university support services, and social infrastructures such as migrant networks all mediate access to housing, often contributing to conditions of precarity. These infrastructures expose less affluent students to discrimination, exploitative housing practices, and exclusion, contributing to the emergence of a ‘two-tier’ housing system that significantly influences the socio-ontological dimensions of student mobility.

About the Speaker: Benjamin Mulvey is a Lecturer based in the School of Education at the University of Glasgow. His work is interdisciplinary, and has been published in journals across the fields of education studies, sociology, and geography. These include Higher Education, Sociology, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and British Journal of Sociology of Education, among others. He has published extensively on international student mobility in various non-Western contexts, and has a broad interest in China’s higher education system.