Fraught subjects: decolonial approaches to racialized international students as “settlers of colour in the making”

Abstract

This paper contributes to migration studies, settler colonial studies and critical internationalization studies by mapping as connected two concurrent settler colonial preoccupations, reconciliation and internationalization. In Canada, as in other Western countries, international students are a crucial resource as they increasingly sustain post-secondary funding. At the same time, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015) has charged the educational sector to put reconciliation and decolonization at the heart of their mandate. Drawing on interviews with racialized international students in Ontario, Canada, this paper examines how racialized international students may have complex relationships to coloniality and be complicit in legitimating settler colonialism. We argue that the processes of reconciliation and internationalization must be understood as deeply interconnected especially because the obfuscation of coloniality is a key technology of settler rule.