Navigating Polycrisis through Research with International Students

Season Theme

Global higher education is in polycrisis in many contexts (Stein, 2025). By polycrisis, we refer to interrelations of multiple destabilizing forces which intersect across social, economic, political, ecological, and personal realms, threatening potential unrest and disruption to existing structures of international higher education. This presents itself through numerous ways, including (but not limited to) multiple intersecting crises affecting: 

• funding and financing of higher education, creating global variations in how international students’ fees are positioned as ‘solutions’ (Weber et al., 2023);
• anti-migration political rhetorics which increasingly lead public discourse and policy (Völker & Gonzatti, 2024), further politicizing the migration-higher education nexus (Cerna & Chou, 2023);
• geopolitical tensions and conflicts between countries, altering and affecting student mobilities (Glass & Minaeva, 2025);
• climate change and instability, impacting the sustainability of educational mobilities and their impact on the planet (Shields, 2019);
• crackdowns on students’ freedom of speech, particularly in relation to the ongoing genocide and scholasticide in Gaza (Ibrahim & Heleta, 2025);
• epistemologies, particularly through the growing prevalence of generative AI and other technologies, where reality itself appears harder to access and facts become debatable. 

Research with international students needs to shift towards navigating and reckoning with polycrisis to avoid obsolescence or risk (further) marginalizing our field as an excessively niche and unimpactful area of scholarship. This conference argues for a turn towards recognizing how our research intersects with wider societies, both contributing to and affecting global and national politics. Without succumbing to despair, we offer this theme as a space to encourage conversations on polycrisis through the following questions:

• How do we define and label polycrisis in research with international students?
• What underpinning and foundational societal issues are of pressing concern for research with international students?
• In what ways might research with international students currently be ignoring or avoiding societal issues of pressing concern?  
• How might research with international students contribute to navigating polycrisis? 
• How can research with international students address the ongoing politicization of our field in society? 

Altogether, we aim to critically question the purpose of our field and how it intersects with the many problems facing our global society. We hope to reflect on how we can uplift one another and be in community while recognizing the significant and rising global challenges being faced.

Panel Schedule at a Glance

This ‘Panel Season’ will take place between February and June 2026, with a range of panels centred around international students and polycrisis. This includes the scheduled panels below.

Subject to speakers’ approval, all panels will be recorded and shared on our YouTube channel.

Date	Panel Title	Full Details	Registration
February 16, 4:00 to 5:30 pm GMT (time zone converter)	Materialities and material injustices in international students’ mobilities	Full details here	Register here
February 23, 9:00 to 10:30 pm GMT (time zone converter)	Politics of immigration: International students and bordering	Full details here	Register here
March 9, 3:00 to 4:30 pm GMT (time zone converter)	Pressures and limitations on international students’ free speech	Full details here	Register here
March 23, 5:00 to 6:30 pm GMT (time zone converter)	Economic and infrastructural pressures encountered by international students	Full details here	Register here
April 20, 5:00 to 6:30 pm BST (time zone converter)	International students’ perspectives on activism and free speech	Full details here	Register here
April 28, 8:00 to 9:30 am BST (time zone converter)	Navigating polycrisis through linguistic, epistemic, political and relational instability in international student life	Full details here	Register here
May 5, 2:00 to 3:30 pm BST (time zone converter)	Politicised framings and representations of international students	Full details here	Register here
May 18, 3:00 to 5:00 BST (time zone converter)	International students and epistemic or knowledge production crises	Full details here	Register here
June 4, 3:00 to 4:30 pm BST (time zone converter)	Queer international students in times of polycrisis: Rethinking research, resistance, and belonging	Full details here	Register here
June 16, 8:00 to 9:30 am BST (time zone converter)	Sustainabilities and international student mobility	Full details here	Register here

Questions

Please direct any questions to: RISnetwork@manchester.ac.uk

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.