Written by Jenna Mittelmeier and Sylvie Lomer (RIS network co-convenors, University of Manchester)
The core functions of the Research with International Students Network are to advocate for the recognition of the politicisation of our research field and to carve new pathways forward for critical scholarship. As we have watched Israel’s genocide unfold in real-time in Gaza for months, we wish to make clear why the pro-Palestine movement is intertwined and interconnected with our research with international students.
The most obvious reason is that some international students are Palestinian and we must stand in solidarity with them as they experience unimaginable fear and grief. The politicisation and misrecognition of Palestinian identities means it is challenging, or even impossible, to know the scale of their presence or needed support at our universities. This is seen, for example, in the recent experiences of Palestinian students at one German university rendered ‘stateless’ by their institution due to their government’s lack of recognition of the Palestinian nation. Therefore, Palestine is a concern for research with international students because Palestinians exist within the very population we work with and our practices shape their experiences. Beyond this, we also must consider the ways that Palestinian students’ status within Israeli institutions forms part of the architecture of state apartheid.
As researchers, we must also recognise the problematic and deliberate targeting of Palestinian universities. All 12 universities in the Gaza strip are now destroyed, and over 100 fellow academics and scholars have died. This ‘scholasticide‘ includes the intentional destruction of cultural heritage, through archives and museums. Such actions force generations of students and scholars into mobility under conditions not seen globally for decades.
Regarding international students, their precarity in hostile state visa systems has been used to stifle their rights to free speech and protest of this genocide within their universities, particularly in Euro-American contexts. The crackdowns on student encampments which are protesting university investments in institutions which profit from the Israeli genocide have led to some international students losing their visas. Other international students have shared experiences of their visa status being weaponised against them by their institutions, in the threat that their continued protest would jeopardise their visa status. As a research field, we should be alarmed by the use of such symbolic and physical violence which puts international students at risk. Their studies should not be overshadowed by fear of repression and their participation in peaceful protest should not lead to calls by politicians for their deportation.
As a research field, we have been working to recognise the ways our research and practice enable an environment which dehumanises international students. As a network, we have campaigned against predominant deficit narratives of international students which position them explicitly and implicitly as lower-quality students. One reason for this is in recognition of how the dehumanisation of international students in our immediate, daily professional practice lends to an environment which legitimised the dehumanisation of migrants in our wider communities. The othering, homogenisation, and racialisation of international students contribute to a global culture which validates the seeing of Palestinians as minoritised and marginalised ‘others’, even amid documented war crimes and genocide. The tendency to assume international students are privileged and migrants by choice further allows us as scholars to look away from Palestine and insulate ourselves and our work from this horror. With the destruction of Gaza, in which the international community is complicit, Palestinian students will be rendered ‘international’ by force and to define international students as ‘not forced migrants’ is a problematic and intentional political choice.
Recent critical turns in research with international students draw upon scholarly thinking which requires us to be critical of coloniality and settler violence. The most prominent of these is the ways our arguments against the othering of international students are rooted in the work of Edward Said, a Palestinian scholar who wrote at length about justice for Palestine. To see his institutional home in the USA, Columbia University, which hosts the Center for Palestine Studies, at the forefront of the violent suppression of student protests, creates a bitter irony for postcolonial studies. Our understandings of culture and oppression are also rooted in the emancipatory writing of scholars like Stuart Hall, Paolo Freire, bell hooks, Angela Davis, and Audre Lorde, several of whom have explicitly written in solidarity with Palestine. As scholars increasingly call for seeing the intersections of internationalisation and decolonisation in our research field, we must recognise how the decolonial writing from scholars such as Franz Fanon and Walter Mignolo implores us to see solidarity with the victims of destructive coloniality. We must see the irony in our field’s tendency to draw from these academic traditions (consciously or unconsciously) without recognition of the political actions implied by their intellectual and contextual histories.
More broadly, international student mobility and global higher education have been associated with an axiological and ideological commitment to globalism. It is the vision of global citizenship – of an understanding of oneself as a member of the world – that has underpinned our commitment and that of many practitioners in the field to international education. The utter failure of countries to stand up for Palestine, the failure of the United Nations, of the structure of international human rights law in the face of genocide streamed in real-time calls these into question. If we can’t understand and protect Palestinians as humans, Palestinian universities as sites of knowledge construction, Palestinian art and archives as part of our collective store of knowledge, what has international education been for?
Research with international students has always been political and our field has rightfully risen to the call to dismantle the dehumanisation of the students we work with and care about. But we risk contradiction and perpetuating further harm by not recognising and speaking out against the genocide in Gaza, as the violence we see there is inextricably intertwined with the work we do here.