RIS Panel Season 2026

Bridging Cultures and Overcoming Inequalities: An Autoethnographic Study of a Brazilian PhD Student’s Exchange in Japan
Presented by Bruna Navarone Santos

This autoethnographic study aims to examine the experience of a Brazilian PhD student, an autistic woman, during a one-year research exchange at a Japanese university, comparing cultural conceptions of science in the Scientific Vocation Program and the Sakura Science High School Program. It intends to explore how family ties and friendships may mediate access to material and symbolic resources that enabled mobility: a government scholarship CAPES-PrInt complemented by crowdfunding; caregiving responsibilities for elderly grandparents that required domestic assistance from the researcher’s mother and aunt; and an initial institutional connection facilitated by friends who had studied and worked at the host university. The study situates the author’s autistic identity and mobility experience within the broader context of Brazilian educational and student retention policies that were fundamental to her training and instrumental in making the international exchange possible. It seeks to show how these personal and policy-level supports may intersect with situated everyday practices in Japan, including those related to neurodiversity and socioeconomic background, shaping everyday experiences of inclusion and exclusion. Through reflective accounts and dialogic exchanges with mentors and peers, this work will analyze how emotions, social capital, cultural capital, and public policies can influence navigation of institutional procedures and academic expectations, suggesting that their interplay might mitigate inequities in international academic mobility. The study advocates that treat scientific knowledge as a socially constructed, collective endeavor, revealing the cultural, historical, and practical processes of knowledge production can foster broader public engagement with science and reinforces the social responsibility that should guide scientific practice.

Representations of International Student Conditionality and Bureaucratic Labour Seen Through Objects, Transitional Space, and Technology as a Counter-Tool 
Presented by Shannon Hutcheson

My research, which critically analyzed international student inequity through policy and testimonies, revealed two themes relevant for understanding materialities and material injustices: their bureaucratic labour and conditional status. In this session, I explore how these concepts are not abstract, but tangibly manifest in objects, spaces, and technology. These reflections are informed by interviews with international students, and personal reflections as a former international student. 

The conditionality of status refers to the contingencies required for students to legally remain in the country of study. The continuous need to meet these criteria is enforced through bureaucratic labour, or the time, waiting, and physical effort of procuring necessary documents. Systemic delays and abrupt policy changes can inflict emotional and material harm, translating to bureaucratic violence. This talk explores how these theoretical concepts are understood through:

Material Objects: Paperwork is an emblematic form of bureaucratic labour and violence. The value imbued in documents (e.g., study permits, visas) and the effort to obtain a physical piece of paper create material inequities. Passport power adds another layer: some students cross borders with only their passport, while others require a larger physical burden of proof (e.g., bank documents, language test results, accommodation plans).

Spaces: International student status is also spatially bound. For example, maintained student status is often contingent on remaining within the country of study’s borders, or risk losing legal standing if traveling outside. This conditional state is also embodied in transitional/liminal spaces like border offices, which represent a state of liminality. These are places where status and permits are sometimes processed, but never assured.

Technology as a Counter-Tool: Finally, technology is explored as a counter-tool against these inequities. Finding support to navigate bureaucracy was essential for some interviewees, with students deferring to their digital community (e.g., WhatsApp) to find answers, support, and at times, comedic relief to cope with conditionality and bureaucratic stumbles.

Connecting the theoretical concepts of bureaucratic labour and conditionality to these material injustices provides depth for understanding how the rapidly evolving polycrisis has a tangible, material impact on international students, particularly those who also navigate with differential passport power. 

Studying and caring across borders: The invisible journey of international students 
Presented by Dangeni

As global populations age, young people are increasingly providing care for older adults. Among them, international students represent a uniquely vulnerable yet under-researched group. Juggling academic responsibilities in a foreign country with caregiving duties, they face a distinct set of challenges. Existing research indicates that student carers in higher education are at high risk of physical and mental health issues, financial strain, and academic underperformance, yet their specific experiences remain largely invisible in policy and research discourses. 

This presentation shares early findings from the InterCare project (2024-2028), focusing on students providing care in Germany, Poland and the UK. Drawing on qualitative data from 1) individual/dyadic interviews and 2) audio diaries, it explores the complex intergenerational care arrangements these students navigate and experience. The analysis is informed by feminist and poststructuralist theories to critically examine the power dynamics and inequities embedded in their experiences. The presentation pays key attention to how these experiences are shaped by gender, socio-economic background, resources, and the nature of their caring roles. By giving voice to this ‘hidden’ cohort, the study aims to bridge a critical gap in research and practice, advocating for more inclusive educational cultures and improved support systems that acknowledge and accommodate the realities of care. 

University Space as Knowledge Culture: A Lefebvrian Analysis of International Students’ Spatial Practices
Presented by Ekaterina Minaeva

As international students go through their journey in foreign host institutions, they encounter cultural and epistemic contradictions, which are a powerful source of generating knowledge through difference (Taylor, 1991). The skill of mediating such contradictions is crucial in the modern world, given the increasing orientation towards interdisciplinarity, the need for political mediation on national and international levels, and the increasing overall complexity of the modern world. This puts international students in a unique position as knowers whose daily practice consists of the mediation of cultures. However, as the nature of the modern university space as a place for knowledge culture is highly fragmented and instrumentalized, it often provides little opportunity to authentically explore these differences and put them into dialogue.

Using Henri Lefebvre’s dialectical-phenomenological account of space as social practice and his concept of the Production of Space, this study explores the embodied experiences of students in the material-discursive structures of the university campus. The study attends to the kinds of contradictions students encounter in the perceived space, and how they move to the lived space—the space of meaning-making that they construct on campus over the course of their studies. Using cognitive sketch mapping as a method for collecting data in three universities in the US (a Jesuit research university with a liberal arts orientation, an elite research-intensive university grounded in classical academic traditions, and a premier engineering and technological institute), the study explores the rhythms and spatial practices of international students on campus, and ultimately aims to answer the question: how do university spaces enable and constrain international students’ cross-cultural meaning-making?

Based on the collected evidence, this study offers several implications in relation to international student support strategy and practice, as well as insights about the role of the university as a space for knowledge production more broadly.

Contesting International Student Mobility as “backdoor immigration”
Presented by Lisa Brunner and Dale McCartney

In July 2023, newly appointed Canadian Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Marc Miller described Canada’s international student program as a potential ‘back-door” to immigration pathways. After many years of supporting international student recruitment, including by offering explicit pathways to citizenship, this was a remarkable discursive shift for the Canadian government – yet echoed similar examples of international student discursive whiplash in other countries, such as Australia (Robertson 2011). In this presentation, we explore the positioning of international student mobility as a ‘back-door’ immigration strategy thorough a ‘microhistory’ (Brewer 2014) of Miller’s attempts to redefine Canada’s bordering regime. In doing so, we examine ‘what the problem is represented to be’ (Bacchi 2009) in Miller’s rhetoric over a year of efforts to reform Canada’s international student policy. The paper is animated by three conceptualizations: (1) doors-of-entry discourse, (2) international students as multi-step immigrants, and (3) narrating migrant legitimacy. It offers the example of Canada as a case study to demonstrate how contested truths can play a role in the ‘epistemic borderwork’ (Davies, Isakjee, and Obradovic-Wochnik 2022) that serves to determine legitimacy of migration pathways. By (re)constructing certain migration pathways as illicit or exploitative through shifting ‘doors of entry discourse,’ state actors produce new dominant truths about migration, legitimacy, and the role of non-state actors (such as post-secondary institutions) in bordering practices. Our paper extends previous work examining the instrumental role of higher education in sustaining border imperialism (Brunner 2023; Brunner et al. 2025a; Brunner and McCartney 2025; McCartney 2021), the performative nature of migration governance, and the malleability of international student legitimacy under shifting geopolitical logics.

Constructing “conditional” rights: A comparative analysis of visa regimes and institutional duties in the U.S. and Australia
Presented by Jinke He 

This submission addresses the panel’s focus on visa restrictions and national security by examining the legal frameworks that govern international students in the United States and Australia. While often discussed as a crisis of integration, this paper draws on a comparative analysis of legal and policy documents to argue that student vulnerability is structurally produced by a “legal limbo” where educational rights are subordinated to immigration control.

The study employs “claim rights” theory to identify the institutional duty-bearers responsible for student protection. The findings reveal that both nations construct what this paper terms “conditional claim rights.” These are defined as entitlements that are fragile and contingent upon maintaining a precarious visa status.

In the United States, the analysis shows that the governance framework situates international students within a “national-security and compliance paradigm.” Here, universities function as compliance intermediaries where student entitlements are diffused and primarily procedural. In Australia, despite a robust consumer-protection framework under the ESOS Act, the law assigns universities a “conflicted dual role” as both service providers and immigration monitors. This dual mandate forces institutions to report non-compliance to the state and creates an internal tension between their educational duties and their obligations to border control.

This paper contributes to the panel by mapping the legal architecture that enables the politicization of international students. By demonstrating how rights are legally constructed as conditional upon security and compliance priorities, this presentation offers the necessary institutional context for understanding how host societies justify and implement restrictive measures against noncitizen students.

Not just subjects of policy: Discursive agency among international students in Quebec
Presented by Ezgi Ozyonum, co-authored with Tanja Tajmel

This study examines how international students in Quebec respond to Canada’s 2024 federal cap on international study permits, a policy that has generated significant national debate but has rarely engaged the perspectives of the people who are most directly affected. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with ten international students and analyzed through a decolonial and critical discourse lens, the study explores how participants interpret, contest, and reposition the policy within their lived experiences of marginalization, precarity, and structural inequalities in Canadian higher education. Rather than treating their comments as individual opinions, the analysis identifies six discursive repertoires: (i) Policy as Protection, (ii) Conditional Support, (iii) Displacement of Blame, (iv) Shock and Disorientation, (v) Pragmatic Navigation, and (vi) Hopeful Reconstruction. Through these repertoires, students articulate agency, critique dominant narratives, and offer alternative understandings of policy intent and impact. Findings reveal that some students endorse aspects of the cap not out of exclusionary motives, but as a protective critique of exploitative institutional, governmental, and market-driven practices that increasingly shape internationalization. These discourses illuminate policy as a negotiated and co-produced process and demonstrate that international students are not passive subjects of policy but active participants whose perspectives should inform current and future directions in Canadian higher education.

Situating these findings within broader debates on the politicization of international students in host societies, this study highlights how the 2024 cap functions not only as a policy instrument but also as a site where political, media, and public anxieties about migration and institutional responsibility are negotiated. In Canada, as in many common host destinations, international students have become increasingly entangled in national conversations around housing crises, labour markets, and social cohesion. The discursive repertoires identified here show that students are acutely aware of how they are positioned within these narratives, and they actively respond to, resist, or rework the politicized framings that shape public sentiment and governmental action. By foregrounding their agency, the study contributes to understanding international students not merely as objects of politicized discourse, but as agents who engage meaningfully with the socio-political conditions that regulate their presence.

On the Record: The Polycrisis Facing U.S. Based International Student Journalists and What It Tells Us About the State of Free Speech
Presented by Samantha Nissen

Doxed, detained, and deported. These terms increasingly appear in describing the experience of international student journalists in the United States. While campus newspapers are seen as training grounds for student reporters, they are also contested spaces where global politics, institutional protectionism, and immigration law collide. 

This paper explores the following overarching research question: How do institutional, legal, and political conditions influence the experiences of international student journalists in the U.S.? 

To answer this, I conduct a multiple case study of two emblematic incidents that have occurred in the wake of the Israel-Gaza War and its backlash on university campuses: (1) The Tufts Daily and columnist Rümeysa Öztürk, who was detained after critiquing the university for its ties to Israel, and (2) The Stanford Daily, which joined a lawsuit with FIRE challenging federal laws that permit visa revocation based on protected speech. Primary materials include media coverage, legal filings, and public statements from student editors and university officials.

The analysis identifies three intersecting pressures shaping these cases: securitization of dissent, institutional liability avoidance, and immigration status as a vector of speech risk. From this emerges a proposed framework for understanding how non citizen student journalists are doubly constrained, by both internal and external pressures, elucidating the ways in which suppression and resistance activates on college campuses.

This study contributes to scholarship on international student mobility, press freedom, and speech inequality. Its implications extend more broadly, showing us the current state of campus free speech in the U.S. Furthermore, this paper well open dialogue on who gets to be a journalist and what is at stake with the silencing of international and non-citizen student journalists.

Revocation Nation: How U.S. Immigration Law Punishes Political Expression in Higher Education
Presented by Melissa Whatley, Santiago Castiello Gutierrez, Shinji Katsumoto, and Chris Marsciano

The study we are proposing to share as part of the politicizations of international students in host societies panel focuses on the use of internationalization of higher education as a geopolitical tool. International students, both in the United States and elsewhere, are embedded in broader geopolitical contests over power, ideology, and knowledge production. This study investigates factors that predicted U.S. international student legal status termination (so-called ‘visa revocations’) in spring 2025. Specifically, in April 2025, at least 1,800 international students had their Student Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) records terminated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), often under opaque justifications linked to threats to national security. These SEVIS record terminations resulted in students’ loss of legal status in the United States, which put these students at risk of potential removal proceedings (i.e., deportation). In our study, we adopt a crimmigration theory lens, which focuses on the merging of criminal law and immigration law as a mechanism of social control. Crimmigration is particularly useful for understanding these so-called ‘visa revocations,’ as international students, despite being legally present and highly vetted by the U.S. government, are increasingly monitored, scrutinized, and punished through immigration enforcement tools. Analytically, we use regression and propensity score modeling applied to a nationally representative sample of 2,144 U.S. higher education institutions. Our results point to a strong correlation between on-campus political protests and legal status terminations. Specifically, institutions with Israel-Palestine related protests on their campuses in spring 2024 were 5 to 21 times more likely to report student visa revocations. Our results also indicate that international students attending research institutions, public institutions, and institutions in New England were also more likely to experience legal status termination, as were those that attended institutions enrolling larger international student populations. These findings offer compelling evidence that political expression on U.S. campuses has recently been met with punitive immigration enforcement and contribute to growing concerns about academic freedom and state power in higher education in the United States and around the world.

Retreating Into A Shell: Reframing Fear and Political Apathy As Geo-Historical Trauma
Presented by Alaa Abdelghaffar

In my most recent research, I examine how the current political climate in the United States is shaping international women graduate students’ views of political agency and participation. Drawing on pláticas with international women students from the Global South, I find that fear and apathy emerge as persistent undertones in how participants understand and enact political engagement on college campuses. These feelings are deeply tied to the precarious nature of international students’ legal status, particularly amid recent visa revocation cases involving students who participated in protests and other forms of political action. The perceived risk of legal or academic consequences leads many students to refrain from political participation altogether, out of concern that any form of visibility could jeopardize their ability to remain in the country or continue their studies. I argue that this fear and resulting disengagement cannot be understood solely as responses to the U.S. context. They rather operate as trauma triggers linked to participants’ prior experiences in their home countries marked by political repression and authoritarian governance, where academic freedom and political dissent were historically constrained or punished. As a trauma trigger, the women students I’ve spoken with often respond to news of campus crackdowns or the persecution of politically active international students with withdrawal and self-silencing. My research complicates dominant narratives of academic freedom by highlighting how transnational histories of political trauma shape international students’ capacity and agency to exercise freedom of speech within U.S. higher education. In my research, I argue that the feeling of fear and apathy are a trigger from past trauma linked to the students’ home countries where political tyranny and authoritarian governance have historically taken over all social institutions and became the normalized reality that obscures any and all practices of overt academic freedom or critique of political hegemony.

A Nuanced Understanding of International Student: Socioeconomically Disadvantaged Chinese International Students’ Motivations and Aspirations For International Higher Education
Presented by Edward Zhang 

International higher education has expanded considerably in recent decades, leading to a substantial increase in international student enrollments and growing academic attention. However, much of the literature in this field continues to rely on a binary distinction between domestic and international students, treating international students as a homogeneous group with little attention paid to socioeconomic differences. This tendency is also evident in studies focusing on Chinese international students, who represent the largest international student group globally. This is problematic, especially when higher educational institutions worldwide have witnessed increasing diversity alongside growing numbers of students, including growing numbers of students who come from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. Given the well-documented impact of socioeconomic disadvantages on students’ experiences and wellbeing, these internal differences merit greater academic attention. By interviewing 25 Chinese socioeconomically disadvantaged students, this study highlights the distinct motivations and aspirations of socioeconomically disadvantaged international students, arguing that they differ significantly from those of their more privileged peers and deserve more focused exploration. Responding to calls for a more heterogeneous understanding of international students, it sheds light on a nuanced understanding of one of the vulnerable groups within international students. In doing so, it advocates a more nuanced and inclusive approach to understanding international student diversity, which should be a main direction for future studies in higher education settings—one that could better support students’ wellbeing and educational success.  

Polycrisis and the fractured identities at the intersection of work, study and migration: International student workers’ perspectives 
Presented by Abigail Ehidiamen

While much research focuses on international students’ educational experiences, this paper seeks to understand their experiences of working while studying, an important but largely over-looked dimension of their realities and a survival strategy.  

In the UK, the positionality of international students in the labour market is affected by the intertwining of government education and migration policies with labour market flexibilisation, combined with the cost-of-living crisis and the increasingly toxic hostile environment discourses. All of these have a significant impact on international students’ realities.  

The paper draws on data gathered from over 20 semi-structured interviews with full-time international students of West African and South Asian heritage who work part-time in the UK. Taking an intersectional approach, the paper problematises their working lives and identity formation. It delves into the complexities, hardships and contradictions of their everyday realities, and examines the ways in which their labour market position, education and migrant status intersect with other social relations of power – related to age, race, gender, class, socio-economic background, caring responsibilities among other dimensions – to shape their unique positionality and their responses to everyday hostilities and socio-economic pressures. 

On the Move and Under Pressure: Housing Precarity in International Students’ Post-Study Transitions 
Presented by M Zulqurnain Ul Haq Qazi 

This paper emerges from a broader qualitative project examining international students’ transitional experiences as they enter the U.S. job market. Focusing specifically on housing precarity, this study explores how economic stress intensifies during the post-graduation period when immigration timelines, financial insecurity, and institutional withdrawal converge to shape students’ everyday lives. Although international students finance their education through varied means, including self-funding, loans, and scholarships, the conclusion of their graduate program marks an abrupt loss of institutional supports such as stipends and student health insurance. Yet their immigration status remains tied to student identity, producing a contradictory period in which legal presence is allowed, but material supports vanish. 

This tension becomes particularly acute in the search for affordable housing. As students enter the 60-day grace period preceding the start of their OPT unemployment clock they must secure housing without guaranteed income, often while managing loan repayments, rising rent, and limited eligibility for public services. Geopolitical uncertainty, anti-migration rhetoric, and broader economic instability further shape their experiences of risk and belonging. 

Drawing on in-depth interviews with Master’s students across multiple graduate programs, this study investigates how housing stress is negotiated, felt, and managed during post-study transition. Participants described strategies such as shared housing arrangements, temporary moves, reliance on informal networks, or withdrawal from the country to navigate uncertainty. These practices reveal how students creatively adapt to intersecting pressures while also highlighting the structural vulnerabilities embedded within U.S. immigration and higher education systems. 

By situating housing precarity within a specific phase of mobility journey, the paper argues that poly crises facing international students evolve over time. The study calls for reimagining institutional responsibilities and policy frameworks to better support international students during moments of profound transition. 

“Relatively Speaking, Students have Freedom [in Political Participation]”: Chinese International Students’ Perceptions and Experiences of Political Participation in Canada 
Presented by Yvonne Zhang 

Global geopolitical turbulence and national politics affect Canadian higher education, increasing student political activism in both on/off-campus settings (Rose-Redwood & Rose-Redwood, 2024). International students are also among those who participate and actively advocate for local/global communities. However, many international students still face numerous barriers to political participation in Canada due to their precarious immigration status and university administrations’ discouragement of student activism (Crumley-Effinger, 2024). Moreover, the neoliberal international education policy also devalues international students’ political agency and contributions (Li, 2016, 2020). Problematically, Chinese international students are often portrayed as having low political interest. Students’ political experiences and obstacles they encountered highlight the urgency in understanding Chinese international students’ experiences of political participation in Canada.  

To confront these misconceptions about (Chinese) international students, this study explores Chinese students’ perceptions and experiences of political participation during their undergraduate studies through investigating their civic engagement and identity formation. Drawing on the civic-minded graduate model (Steinberg et al., 2011) and social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979), this study employed a qualitative methodology and interviewed seven Chinese international students from two universities in Quebec, Canada. Through reflective thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022), this study revealed that students’ nationality, immigration status, and their intersections influenced their preferences, motivations and barriers to political participation. The findings showed that Canadian universities and societal environment creates systemic barriers, which may impact Chinese students’ participation. However, students’ experiences highlighted international education in Canada can still serve as a channel for international students from authoritarian backgrounds to engage in in-person activism. Additionally, the perceptions of freedom of speech are connected to Chinese students’ intersecting social identities. By situating this study within Canada’s international education, it provides evidence-based insights for practitioners and researchers to understand the benefits and barriers of international student political activism from the scope of Chinese students’ experiences.

The impact of international educational mobility on Russian young people’s aspirations to engage socio-politically on return to Russia 
Presented by Tatiana Mednikova

The extant literature on the link between international education and socio-political development often emphasises the role political socialisation in democratic host societies plays in shaping foreign students’ democratic values and encouraging them to advocate for democratic change in the home country. In this panel, I will discuss these assumptions drawing on the findings of my doctoral research project which explored the impact of international educational mobility on Russian young people’s socio-political views and engagement. Specifically, I will explore how studying abroad influences Russian mobile students’ aspirations to engage socio-politically in Russia. The analysis draws on data from 55 in-depth interviews with Russian students and alumni of British and American universities. The evidence reveals that the supposedly transformative nature of international student experience – i.e. alumni’s ability and intention to contribute to political change – is severely constrained by the repressive political landscape in Russia and young people’s prevailing focus on the private sphere. Furthermore, while international mobility does appear to influence social and civic involvement, this impact is typically expressed in small-scale and non-confrontational initiatives. The findings contribute to the debates about socio-political outcomes of international education, challenge the overly deterministic association of foreign students’ political socialisation in a democratic host society with their political agency and systemic macro-changes, and show the significance of the origin country’s political landscape in examining the transfers of democratic norms and behaviours. This presentation will contribute to the panel on international student activism and freedom of speech by examining how international students’ socio-political aspirations and initiatives are impeded by restrictive political environments.

Affective Mobilisation and Solidarity: An Autoethnography of a Chinese International Student Influencer’s Digital Practice 
Presented by Zhuo Wang 

In an era where the political speech of international students is often circumscribed, this study explores an alternative, potent form of agency: affective mobilisation through everyday digital practice. Moving beyond the binary of overt protest versus silence, I investigate how emotional labour and affective resonance can forge vibrant, visible communities of solidarity.

Drawing on critical autoethnography, I leverage my dual position as a PhD researcher and a Xiaohongshu content creator who narrates the transnational student experience. This insider-outsider vantage point allows me to critically examine how strategic emotional storytelling—sharing experiences of anxiety, hope, or cultural negotiation does not merely seek personal catharsis but performs deliberate affective practice. This practice cultivates a high-engagement digital space where comments and likes become metrics of shared feeling, transforming individual posts into lively hubs of peer support and collective identification.

Preliminary analysis reveals that this affectively charged engagement constitutes a powerful, relational form of solidarity. It provides a sense of belonging and mutual recognition often absent in politically fraught or isolating host environments. For many students, participating in these digital affective economies becomes a way to navigate polycrisis—geopolitical tension, migration precarity, academic pressure—without engaging in explicitly political speech that might carry risk.

This study contributes to the panel by expanding the conceptual toolkit for understanding international student activism. It highlights affective practice as a legitimate and impactful mode of mobilization and community-building, especially under constraints. It argues that research must take seriously the political significance of relational solidarity forged in digital spaces, recognizing it as a vital form of student agency, resilience, and collective world-making.

Polycrisis, Power, and Voice: Linguistic Racism and the Making of Hybrid Identities in Multilingual International Student Life
Presented by Nashid Nigar 

This research demonstrates that international students’ lives and identities cannot be understood through isolated, binary, or deficit-based frameworks; rather, they must be situated within the wider polycrisis—a convergence of linguistic, cultural, political, material, and experiential-epistemic destabilisations that shape everyday academic life. Within this backdrop, linguistic racism becomes one of the most immediate and embodied forms through which crisis is felt, operating through misrecognition, accent policing, and the devaluation of non-Western knowledge systems. Such experiences align with Dovchin’s (2020) analysis of linguistic racism as a form of psychological and affective harm, revealing how crisis is lived through the body, voice, and affective labour of speaking, and intersecting with other forms of marginalisation (Nigar et al., 2024) that illustrate how polycrisis manifests across overlapping axes of power. At the same time, as Nigar (2025) shows, (im)migrant educators and students do not merely endure the multifaced ostracizations; they actively reassemble and reshape themselves through hybrid professional and academic becomings (Nigar & Kostogriz, 2025). Their identities emerge at the intersection of power, desire, critical reflection agency, solidarity, and imagination, challenging native-speakerism and its hegemonic epistemologies. This aligns with wider scholarship (Cadman & Song, 2012; Canagarajah, 2016; Deuchar, 2023; Manathunga, 2018, 2024; Pretorius & Macaulay (2021); Ryan, 2016; Soong & Mu, 2025; Viete & Ha, 2007), which reframes hybridity as a productive space of negotiation, resistance, creativity, and experiential-intellectual becoming. While the polycrisis destabilises, it also creates openings for new cosmopolitan and transcultural possibilities (Nigar et al., 2025), as students’ translanguaging, narrative meaning-making, and relational care produce counter-discourses that challenge monolingual norms and reclaim epistemic legitimacy. Their hybrid repertoires become resources for rethinking academic cultures and resisting assimilationist expectations. Holistically, this research calls for a transformation in higher education that centres relationality, co-theorisation, and transcultural responsibility. By recognising international students as hybrid knowledge producers and cosmopolitan imaginators, institutions can dismantle monolingual and Eurocentric structures and cultivate justice-oriented, affectively attuned, and structurally aware approaches for navigating global instability, enabling new futures of belonging, knowledge, and professional possibility (Nigar & Kostogriz, 2025; Nigar et al., 2025).

From Firewall to Frontline: Chinese Students’ Social Justice Literacy in the Polycrisis
Presented by Xingxing Yu

For Chinese international students, the polycrisis manifests as an acute epistemological and political collision. Arriving with a conceptual baseline where social justice is often tied to state-led stability (Cho, 2024), they enter host societies rife with geopolitical tensions and criticisms of their home country. This paper explores the divergent trajectories of their social justice literacy. It argues that students’ responses are shaped by two key factors: their information pathways (i.e., continued immersion in state-linked media vs. engagement with diasporic or host-country sources) and their lived experiences of marginalisation (e.g., neo-racism) (Gong et al., 2022; Li, 2025; Long, 2022; Ruan et al., 2021). These encounters catalyse a critical transcultural literacy, forcing a recalibration of identity. Emerging findings suggest this divergence is not binary but a spectrum (Fong, 2011), ranging from a defensive, repressive nationalist stance that functions as an emotional shield (Hail, 2015; Wong, 2024; Zhao, 2020), to an emergent critical consciousness and activism, as seen in the 2022 Blank Paper protests (Li, 2025; Zeng & Cheng, 2024). This analysis connects the epistemic crisis and freedom of speech threads of the polycrisis, examining how students form political identities on the frontline of competing ideologies.

Living Through the Cracks: Belief, Misfit, and Relational Wellbeing in Nepalese International Student Life
Presented by Sandeep Khattri and Lynette Pretorius

Nepalese international students’ participation in higher education is shaped by interconnected social, economic, and political instabilities at home, including limited educational opportunities and systemic inequities (Bista, 2015; Limbu, 2023; Mainali, 2019). For many Nepalese middle-class families, these conditions position overseas study as a strategic route for securing status and opportunity (Adhikari, 2010; Valentin, 2015), reflecting wider regional trends in which middle-class households invest in international education as a strategy for social mobility (Waters, 2006; Xiang & Shen, 2009). After arrival in the host nation, students often experience identity strain, cultural and linguistic challenges, financial pressures, and the need to undertake low-skilled labour, which conflicts with their middle-class self-understandings (Limbu, 2023; Rai, 2022; Valentin, 2015). These overlapping pressures constitute a polycrisis that unsettles students’ expectations, relationships, and everyday academic practices. They create conditions in which inherited dispositions no longer align with the shifting logics of new educational fields, a dynamic that resonates with Bourdieu’s notion of hysteresis (disjuncture/misalignment) (Bourdieu, 1977).
Building on this, the paper examines how Nepalese international students negotiate this dispositional misalignment and how their belief in the “game” and promise of international education, conceptualised through Bourdieu’s notion of illusio (investment/commitment) (Bourdieu, 1977), is sustained amidst precarity, misrecognition, and symbolic contradiction. While existing scholarship highlights the structural and classed dynamics of international student mobility (Brooks & Waters, 2011; Marginson, 2013; Tran, 2016), it gives limited attention to the dispositional, affective, and symbolic mechanisms through which students continue to invest in the field despite instability. Integrating relational wellbeing scholarship, which conceptualises wellbeing as socially mediated and contextually emergent  (White, 2010, 2015; White & Jha, 2023), the paper shows how students cultivate relational anchors, negotiate belonging, and assemble new orientations that make instability liveable. Collectively, the analysis shows how Nepalese international students negotiate instability in ways that reshape their orientations, supporting new forms of becoming within the conditions of contemporary polycrisis.
 
Reworking English Across Borders: Sociocultural Challenges and Agency of Indonesian Postgraduates in Australia
Presented by Faiqah Real and Nashid Nigar

This study investigates the interplay of language, identity, and belonging among Indonesian postgraduate students in Australian higher education. While English proficiency tests such as the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) are widely used as indicators of academic readiness, they overlook the affective, sociocultural, and epistemic dimensions of language use within institutional contexts. Drawing on a sociocultural framework (Kostogriz, 2006) and theories of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007) and hybrid professional becoming (Nigar & Kostogriz, 2025), this hermeneutic phenomenological study is based on semi‑structured interviews with four Indonesian master’s students in education‑related programs. Findings show that academic writing was the most affectively taxing site of engagement, shaped by tacit expectations of tone, structure, and argumentation. Participants reported linguistic discrimination, cultural dissonance, and affective surveillance in both classroom and peer interactions, often internalising deficit framings. Yet, they also demonstrated agency through translanguaging, peer networks, faith‑based affiliations, and the use of digital tools, including AI writing assistants. These strategies represent hybrid, justice‑oriented negotiations rather than remedial adaptations. The study makes an original contribution by centring the affective and epistemic labour of Indonesian students—an underrepresented cohort in internationalisation research—and by reframing their practices as relational and agentive rather than deficient. Policy and pedagogical implications include equipping educators with intercultural and translanguaging pedagogies, reforming institutional assessment practices to value multimodal literacies, embedding peer and faith‑based support structures, and integrating critical AI literacy training to ensure digital tools empower rather than regulate multilingual learners. At the policy level, the study highlights the need for accreditation and support frameworks that recognise multilingual students’ identities and knowledge systems. While based on a small, qualitative sample, the study provides situated insights into how transnational learners reconstitute academic identities across borders, offering a framework for rethinking equity and justice in global higher education.

The politicisation of international students through social policy in the UK and implications for social exclusion
Presented by Isaac Thornton 

One key way in which the presence of international students is politicised in host societies is through social policy. This presentation explores the social policy context for international students in the UK and its implications for social exclusion (an inability to fully participate in society). Within a rapid review policy literature addressing international student experience, forty-two articles from the Web of Science and Social Science Research Network (SSRN) were selected through multiple screenings. Migration and education were the most explored policy areas, followed by inequalities, work, health and wellbeing, security, and housing. Results demonstrated that policy both creates barriers to inclusion (e.g. hostile environment migration/bordering practices) and supports inclusion/adaption to social exclusion-related challenges (e.g. sanctuary scholarships for forced migrants, Graduate visas). All international students to some degree lack equitable participation in wellbeing-relevant provision. In a liberal paradox, policies are constructed so the state and universities can extract value from international students without fully including them in British society. Policies abdicate responsibility for students’ inclusion, making it expensive and complicated to build a life here. Amidst the broader politicisation of international students as migrants, international education is facilitated albeit under strict and exclusionary conditions.

Cash Cows and Patriotic Communists: Discursive representation of Chinese international students in the UK News 
Presented by Shuang Gao 

This paper examines how Chinese international students are portrayed in mainstream media in the UK. Media discourse constitutes a key site for the reproduction and dissemination of racial ideologies about international students (Brooks, 2017; Suspitsyna & Shalka, 2019; Yao & Mwangi, 2022). About 400 reports from British newspapers were collected via keyword search on Gale OneFile: News for the timeframe of 2013 to 2023, covering key national initiatives to internationalize UK HE as an export industry, including International Education: Global Growth and Prosperity in 2013, International Education Strategy: Global Potential, Global Growth in 2021 (Lomer et al., 2018), as well as key crisis affecting UK HE, including Covid-19 (2020-2022) and the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC, 2019) reports on racism in UK HE. Using thematic and critical discourse analysis, the paper reveals two main ways Chinese international students are portrayed: cash cows and patriotic communists, with limited attention to anti-Chinese racism. Within the ‘cash cow’ frame, Chinese international students are discussed in terms of student numbers, contribution to university income, and occasionally as business investors in the UK. With the ‘patriotic communists’ frame, Chinese international students are discussed as allies of the Chinese government, working as spies, threatening academic freedom on British campuses, and blocking Hong Kong democratic efforts overseas. It is thus argued that these representations perpetuate the Othering of Chinese international students in the UK and, consistent with the rhetoric in the above-mentioned key national initiatives to internationalize UK HE, contribute to a narrow understanding of Chinese international students based on British national interests. These public news discourses reproduce anti-migration ideologies not dissimilar to those faced by the Windrush generation (Wardle & Obermuller, 2019): Chinese international students are needed by the UK but not wanted in the UK.

The Political Framing of International Students in Germany: A Comparative Analysis of Recent Coalition Agreements
Presented by Andreas Gkolfinopoulos

After Brexit, Germany remains the leading host country for international students in the EU and, in 2022, became the third most significant destination country for international students worldwide for the first time. This development is the result of political initiatives and geopolitical objectives pursued in recent years. However, how are international students addressed in government plans in Germany, and in which contexts are they framed as political targets?

This paper examines the coalition agreements of the previous (2021–2025) and current (2025–present) German governments to answer these questions. These documents will be analysed comparatively using content analysis. This comparison is particularly interesting because it reflects a shift in German migration policy following the election of the new Christian Democratic (CDU) Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and under the pressure of the rise of the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) with its anti-immigration positions. This shift becomes visible through the comparison of both coalition agreements, as international students in the new coalition agreement are mentioned—directly or indirectly—much more clearly in the context of economic and geopolitical objectives. They are also presented as a distinctly welcome group of immigrants, in contrast to other forms of migration such as “irregular migration.”

The discussion is framed by the theoretical perspectives of soft power and the geopolitics of the knowledge-based economy. In addition, Germany’s geopolitical aspirations and UNESCO statistical data will be examined to identify the world regions on which Germany has focused in its efforts to attract international students. Overall, this analysis sheds light on how host societies integrate international students into their geo-political objectives, as outlined in official government documents.

The Stranger Student: Affective Bordering and the Politicisation of International Students in the UK
Presented by Aisling Tiernan

This presentation introduces the concept of the stranger student to explain how visa-required international students in the United Kingdom are positioned within a landscape shaped by tightening migration controls, financial pressures in higher education and growing geopolitical uncertainty. Drawing on qualitative research with 29 international students at 12 UK universities, the paper argues that universities play a central role in the politicisation of international students through practices of surveillance, documentation, emotional regulation and institutional suspicion. These practices, often described as routine compliance activities, form part of an expanding infrastructure of everyday bordering that brings immigration governance directly into the university.

The stranger student is included in the university but only on conditional terms. Students are actively recruited, celebrated in diversity narratives and relied upon financially, yet at the same time they are monitored, checked, verified and made to account for their presence. This creates a form of ambivalent inclusion in which students feel both welcomed and suspect. Their belonging depends on continuous performances of legitimacy, solvency, punctuality and calmness, even when dealing with distress or uncertainty. These expectations generate what can be understood as affective bordering: a mode of governance that shapes not only what students must do, but how they must feel and present themselves.

By situating these dynamics within wider political and institutional pressures, the paper shows how multiple forces converge on international students. These include hostile migration rhetoric, financial dependency on international student fees and the uneven distribution of mobility opportunities across national contexts. The stranger student concept provides a way to understand how such forces are lived and negotiated in everyday university settings.

The presentation concludes by suggesting that research with international students can support more transparent, proportionate and care centred approaches to internationalisation by making visible the institutionalised bordering practices that shape their lives.

Reconceptualizations of Migrant Youth Safety: Lessons from Participatory Research Along the Thai Myanmar Border
Presented by Christie Young Smith 

This project offers an opportunity to reflect on epistemic justice and the politics of knowledge production with migrant youth on the border of Thailand and Myanmar (Burma). Drawing on a qualitative, participatory study conducted with twenty migrant youth in Mae Sot, Thailand, the work foregrounds the epistemic authority of migrant young people whose lives have been shaped by compounding crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, school closures, Myanmar’s military coup, and ongoing conscription pressures. Rather than treating youth as data sources for extraction, the study was embedded in a six-month Youth Champions fellowship, where participants embodied the role of co-researchers whose perspectives actively shaped the knowledge produced.

Guided by decolonial research theory and student-centered pedagogies, the project invited youth to articulate their own conceptualizations of safety and to interrogate dominant international development narratives that often reduce migrant youth to victims or beneficiaries. Their analyses revealed nuanced understandings of safety as both conscious and unconscious, relational, political, and intersectional, shaped by transnational movement and by a liminal sense of “relative safety” between Myanmar and Thailand. By centering these youth-led frameworks, the study challenges universalized models of protection and instead situates safety within young people’s lived realities, adaptive strategies, and collective strengths.

On an epistemic level, the research demonstrates how participatory and decolonial methodologies create space for youth to reclaim interpretive power, resist colonial knowledge hierarchies, and engage in personal and skill development through dialogic teaching and learning. It highlights how methodological choices, including power-sharing, co-analysis, and attention to cultural and emotional dimensions of research, are themselves forms of epistemic justice.

Ultimately, the project contributes to broader conversations on how knowledge about migrant youth is produced, who is authorized to define key concepts like safety, and how participatory research can function as a site of healing, critical pedagogy, and decolonial knowledge generation within transnational contexts.

Reframing international students as epistemic agents, and international mobility as a lived practice of engaging with complexity, allows universities to expand their culture of knowing and unlock the full developmental and epistemic potential of international student experiences.

Provisional Academic Writer Identity: Chinese Students’ Strategic Negotiations with Colonial Knowledge Hierarchies
Presented by Yaxin Zhang

When a Chinese student told me, “I don’t think my voice matters” in UK academic writing, I initially heard an individual deficit. Months later, I recognised structural critique. This contribution examines how Chinese postgraduate students in one-year UK master’s programmes strategically navigate epistemic violence within colonial knowledge hierarchies, proposing “provisional academic writer identity” as an analytical lens for understanding their pragmatic positioning.

Drawing on reflexive analysis of pilot study data from a pre-sessional EAP course, I trace how students internalise deficit narratives about Chinese academic traditions, describing their previous writing as “messy,” “lacking logic,” or “simple analysis” while simultaneously developing what they call “confidence” as English academic writers. Through the concept of provisional academic writer identity, I reframe this apparent contradiction: students are not failing to integrate into UK academic communities but strategically adopting temporary identities they assume they would abandon post-graduation.

This contribution addresses the panel’s concern with epistemic production crises by revealing how marketised UK higher education structures international students’ provisional participation while claiming to value “global perspectives.” Students’ accurate assessment that their voices “don’t matter” exposes universities’ careful incuriosity about whether programmes involve genuine intellectual engagement or strategic compliance. Their provisional positioning becomes sophisticated resistance to epistemicide rather than incomplete acquisition of target discourse norms.

In post-truth environments where facts become debatable, Chinese students’ navigation of competing epistemologies, Chinese academic traditions versus Anglophone conventions, offers critical insights into recognising and contributing to truth claims under conditions of epistemic uncertainty. Rather than pathologising their “disengagement,” a provisional academic writer identity validates their strategic distance as a reasonable response to structural marginalisation.

This contribution challenges research with international students to interrogate how we reproduce colonial knowledge hierarchies while claiming anti-deficit stances, asking: if students say their voices do not matter and they are right, are we willing to change the conditions that make this true?

Translanguaging as Opportunity & Precarity: Trans-Epistemic Strategies in EMI
Presented by Yaseen Ali 

Translanguaging describes not only fluid movements between discrete languages, but a trans-epistemic strategy to counter the hermeneutical and testimonial injustices that multilingual students encounter in English medium instruction (EMI) environments (Zheng & Qui, 2024). As students can leverage the full spectrum of their idiolects (i.e., personal and idiosyncratic languages) in both accessing and co-creating knowledge (Otheguy et al., 2015), translanguaging also has the potential to position all languagers in learning spaces as “epistemic equals” (Hayes, 2019). 

This presentation shares select findings from an interpretivist study conducted at a Canadian post-secondary institution’s learning and development centre. 22 EAL-identifying graduate students – the majority of them international students – were invited to engage in critical language awareness activities that encouraged a shift away from characterizing “English” as a stable language and towards “Englishing” (Pennycook, 2007), a situated activity consisting of translingual practices (Canagarajah, 2013). While ideating outside of the monolingual paradigm of “English-only,” participants highlighted the bespoke strategies for meaning-making and negotiation that they intrinsically use for learning and collaboration. All the same, students noted conditions of precarity that could ensue (e.g., diminished professional opportunities) if they are perceived as deviating from so-called prestigious forms of Englishes.  

This presentation connects to the theme on “epistemic and knowledge production crises” because it posits that fostering non-judgmental metalanguaging spaces can support students in honing their discernment in the midst of accelerating technologies such as generative AI and accent modification apps. By respecting students’ innate criticality and spontaneity (as well as their situated learning goals), translanguaging pedagogies can prompt internal shifts that counter epistemic injustice (Zheng & Qiu, 2024). While it is vital to not discount the potential risks of translanguaging for international students, metalanguaging spaces (as fostered by this study) offer sites of praxis to resist monolingual norms and expectations that persist in EMI.

Who Becomes a Viable Doctoral Subject?: International Doctoral Applicants and the Digital Production of Admissibility
Presented by Evan Zheng 

This presentation discusses preliminary findings from an ongoing study on the admissibility of international doctoral applicants, drawn from a ten-month multi-sited digital ethnography. While doctoral admission practices vary across disciplines, institutions and national systems, many contemporary contexts continue to frame selection as merit-based (McGloin et al., 2024; Posselt, 2016; Jung, Li & Horta, 2023). Such discourses often construct merit as a ‘neutral’ and objective measure of academic potential (e.g., Baez, 2006), yet they operate within entrenched colonial knowledge hierarchies that privilege particular epistemic norms and forms of academic excellence. International students, therefore, do not simply enter pre-existing procedures; rather, they navigate an evaluative terrain in which what counts as admissible, potential, and even truth is already unevenly distributed.

Against the backdrop of contemporary ‘post-truth’ environments where information about admissions and academic legitimacy circulates through fragmented digital spaces, the study examines how prospective Chinese students seeking overseas doctoral programmes make sense of, negotiate and reproduce epistemic claims about admissibility. Informed by Butler’s theorisation of intelligibility and recognition (Butler, 2005), I conceptualise admission not as the assessment of static traits (e.g., GPA, GRE scores), but as an ongoing process through which applicants seek institutional and peer recognition as intelligible doctoral subjects.

Drawing on observations across Chinese social media platforms, the paper identifies a series of ‘mini-interpellations’ through which applicants are evaluated, questioned, encouraged, or dismissed by largely anonymous online actors. These interactions reveal a digitally mediated normative matrix that precedes and conditions who can appear as a legitimate doctoral candidate. I argue that such moments illuminate international students’ participation in epistemic production as they both reproduce and challenge the hierarchies that shape their own admissibility.

Negotiating Knowledge, Ecology, and Power: A Decolonial Inquiry into International Algerian Students’ Global Citizenship Learning
Presented by Amina Lechkhab

The paper examines how Algerian international students in the United Kingdom navigate global citizenship education (GCE), intercultural communication, and ecological concerns within a global higher-education landscape marked by polycrisis. Using decolonial and ecological frameworks, the research explores how students make sense of intercultural encounters, global citizenship discourses, and sustainability initiatives during their mobility experiences. Although GCE is widely promoted in international education, its implementation often remains ambiguous and aligned with neoliberal agendas that privilege economic and instrumental goals over transformative, socially just learning.

Drawing on thematic analysis of interviews, diary entries, and participant observations, the study reveals both opportunities and constraints in Algerian students’ engagement with GCE. Formal educational spaces frequently overlook students’ sociocultural histories and perspectives, limiting their ability to critically question Western-centric narratives embedded in global citizenship frameworks. In contrast, informal and extracurricular settings, including community activities, peer networks, and sustainability projects, offer more supportive spaces for agency, reflexivity, and participation in intercultural and ecological initiatives.

The findings highlight persistent power asymmetries within international education, including issues of representation, voice, and equity, uneven access to sustainability programmes, and the continued dominance of Global North epistemologies. Although students engage enthusiastically in volunteer work, ecological practices, and civic-minded initiatives, structural inequalities shape the terms of their participation and the extent to which their contributions are recognised. These dynamics reveal how international education often reproduces colonial hierarchies that marginalise perspectives from postcolonial contexts and limit the transformative potential of GCE. In response, the study calls for a more inclusive and relational approach to global citizenship education, one that actively centres students’ lived experiences, embraces epistemic plurality, acknowledges ecological interdependencies, and commits to practices of reciprocity, repair, and collective responsibility. This entails not only widening participation but also decolonising the knowledge frameworks and institutional cultures that define whose ideas, values, and futures matter within global citizenship discourses.

Overall, the study contributes to critical debates on international student research by emphasizing the need to decolonize GCE and redesign international mobility programs toward more equitable, sustainable forms of global belonging. It concludes by advocating for institutional policies and pedagogies that center inclusivity, student agency, and critical reflection, positioning global citizenship as a transformative response to contemporary global challenges.

Reconceptualizing University Knowledge Culture: International Students as Central Practitioners of Complexity
Presented by Ekaterina Minaeva

This theoretical study argues that the epistemic position of international students cannot be meaningfully understood without first reconceptualizing university knowledge culture. Contemporary universities tend to treat “culture” as a collection of fragmented subcultures -organizational, disciplinary, managerial-rather than as a unified culture of knowing that orients how knowledge is produced, interpreted, and lived. Although universities should constitute holistic discursive and dialectical spaces in which diverse epistemic logics encounter one another and generate productive contradictions, current institutional conditions, such as instrumentalization, performativity, and epistemic siloing, flatten culture, constrain dialogue, and limit students’ developmental possibilities.

These limitations are particularly problematic in a world marked by rapid technological acceleration and escalating socio-ecological complexity. Modern conditions require students to move far beyond narrowly instrumental forms of knowledge, engage with complexity and work meaningfully across epistemic cultures, treating contradictions between them as generative sourse of knowledge. Drawing on systems thinking, ecological theory, and transdisciplinarity, this study argues for a fundamental reorientation of university knowledge culture toward an integrated, atmospheric, and meaning-bearing culture of knowing: one that is embodied, discursive, dialectical, historically layered, and capable of treating epistemic contradiction as a generative condition for inquiry. Such a culture would sustain multiple epistemic logics in non-reductive dialogue and cultivate a metacognitive stance suited for engaging emergent, nonlinear realities.

Within this reimagined framework, international students emerge not as peripheral participants but as central real-life practitioners of complexity. Their daily negotiation of cultural, linguistic, and epistemic difference constitutes a genuine and sustained exercise in working with contradiction, historicity, relationality, and epistemic plurality. Yet universities rarely acknowledge this epistemic labor. Instead, international students are frequently positioned through deficit and othering narratives that obscure their developmental potential, underutilize the epistemic richness of international student mobility, and limit the kinds of support institutions provide.

Defining Polycrisis in the Context of Queer International Students
Presented by Mohit Dudeja

This part situates queer international students at the center of the polycrisis conversation. While global discourses on polycrisis emphasize economic volatility, climate change, and political instability, these framings often neglect how queer and trans migrants (especially international students) uniquely encounter and negotiate overlapping crises. Drawing on critical internationalization literature and queer migration studies, I argue that “polycrisis” cannot be defined merely as a collection of global problems; it must be understood as a lived and embodied experience. For queer international students, polycrisis includes negotiating immigration systems hostile to both sexuality and nationality, precarious financial realities shaped by racialized labor markets, and academic environments that claim inclusion while reproducing systemic exclusions. As such, highlight how crises are experienced unevenly and how their impact is magnified at the nexus of queerness, migration, and student precarity.

Foundational Societal Issues and Their Pressing Relevance
Presented by Tori Yang

Queer international students occupy a fraught position at the intersection of racism, xenophobia, heteronormativity, and tightening border regimes. Their marginalization is not the sum of these categories but an irreducibly intersectional condition lived across social arenas. In a moment marked by the global rise of right-wing authoritarianism and increasingly punitive immigration controls, status precarity amplifies surveillance and risk, rendering queer international students especially vulnerable to exclusion and deportability. At the same time, international education markets inclusion, diversity, and “global citizenship” while quietly governing mobility and disciplining political expression. Fear of visa repercussions, compliance with immigration reporting, and uneven protections from universities deter many from participating fully in political movements, casting civic engagement as a status hazard rather than a democratic right. A second mechanism is intersectional invisibility: LGBTQ services often presume citizenship and cultural familiarity, while international student offices presume heteronormativity. I seek to reorient the question from whether queer international students “adjust” or “succeed” to how international education as an institution reproduces structures of marginalization. While attending to the polycrisis that shapes their conditions of life, it also foregrounds the forms of agency, solidarity, and quiet resistance through which queer international students navigate and contest these constraints.

Avoidance and Silences in Current Research
Presented by Gerald Walton

Significant silences mark current research on queer international students. Queer migration is often theorized without accounting for coloniality and through homonationalist discourses that frame Western states as liberators of racialized queers, ignoring the complexities of migration and global power relations. International students are imagined as a cisgender, heterosexual, racially homogenous, and economically privileged group, primarily needing academic or migration support, while their queer identities and intersectional experiences remain invisible. They are stereotyped as wealthy, transient, and apolitical, detached from political struggles in both home and host contexts. Furthermore, scholarship rarely examines their transnational activism or political solidarities, and continues to employ Western-centric frameworks, sidelining Indigenous and postcolonial perspectives that could illuminate the nuanced realities of queer mobility.

Research as Relational Resistance in Times of Polycrisis
Presented by Fatemeh Gharibi

This part foregrounds research as a deeply political and relational practice in times of “polycrisis”. It highlights queer international students’ activism in Canada amidst overlapping risks and precarities and invites us to look up to them. Rather than treating activism merely as an object of study, this discussion draws on “activist scholarship” and a “desire-based approach” to co-produce knowledge with care, reciprocity and accountability and resists deficit narratives and neoliberal logics of inclusion. A desire-based lens illuminates agency, creativity, and collective world-making, challenging nation-state narratives of belonging and citizenship. Queer international students teach us that connecting struggles locally and transnationally enables strategies of survival and solidarity. By centring relationality and reciprocity, this part argues that knowledge production is never neutral but deeply political, an act of co-resistance. It calls for research agendas that move beyond institutional “support” toward structural commitments to justice, accountability, and transformative praxis in times of polycrisis.

Green Initiatives in International Marketing: Sustainability on Display?
Presented by Pii-Tuulia Nikula 

Environmental crisis, such as climate change and biodiversity loss, are eroding our ability to sustain a livable planet for humanity. Higher education institutions across the globe have introduced a range of sustainability initiatives to reduce their own environmental impact and educate students on these issues. However, inherent tensions within higher education make addressing some sustainability challenges difficult or even paradoxical. For instance, the goals of internationalisation and climate action often conflict, particularly when aviation-based physical mobility is required, given the significant greenhouse gas emissions associated with international travel.

Sustainability has also become a marketised instrument to achieve other objectives, such as success in international rankings or service as a drawcard for attracting prospective international students. Emerging evidence suggests that sustainability is now considered by some prospective students when choosing where to study. However, there is scarce scholarly literature on the use of sustainability credentials in international education marketing and the types of sustainability issues that universities choose to highlight.

How do universities use environmental sustainability in their international education marketing? This research employs qualitative content analysis to examine the international prospectuses of all New Zealand universities. The analysis includes references to environmental sustainability, the evidence supporting these claim (if any), and the functions, such as teaching/learning, research, and administration, with which these issues are associated. 

The findings indicate a degree of differentiations: several institutions actively promoted their green credentials to prospective international students, while others remained passive in this area. Climate change was the most commonly mentioned environmental issue, but many sustainability references remained vague or lacked specificity. The prospectuses functioned as marketing tools that either portrayed universities as sustainability champions or largely ignored questions of environmental sustainability. The corpus demonstrated a lack of critical engagement, with no attempts to raise awareness of the environmental impacts of international student mobility.

[Title coming soon]
Presented by Giorgio Di Pietro

[Abstract coming soon]