The capitalist dialectics of international student mobility in the modern world-system

Abstract

International higher education (IHE) and with that international student mobility (ISM) and internationalisation have become widely embedded in the educational mobility literature as commonplace conceptualisations in a world which is everywhere imagined as globalised. The present response paper considers the contribution of the papers of this special issue to our understanding of ISM and to international study-abroad in Asia while also locating this in the wider context of ISM in a capitalist modern world-system. The testimonies of the participants in these papers concerning their inter-Asian study-abroad experiences evidence their keen consciousness of the marketised nature of international higher education while also demonstrating how they negotiate and often resist this. The inter-Asian experience of international study-abroad while revealing of the racial and linguistic prejudices which some sojourners can face, also show how these international students may additionally discover accidental and unlooked for ‘fringe’ capitals which disrupt their ‘neoliberal’ positioning and are potentially transformative and self-liberating. In this brief response paper, I place ISM and inter-Asian study-abroad within a Marxist and critical realist dialectical ontology so as to be able to delve more deeply into this experience and to give greater theoretical context to the transformative possibilities which ISM presents.