When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, education institutions, international education stakeholders (e.g., education agents) as well as aspiring international students were faced with an unexpected global health emergency which halted any kind of international mobility. While migration and mobility scholars attempted to make sense of this global immobility, localized mobility restrictions to hinder the spread of COVID-19 were fundamentally reshaping the lived experiences, expectations and aspirations of international students themselves. While the pandemic in Australia heralded temporary hardships, restrictions and stresses, there are also fundamental long-term implications to international student mobility scholarship. Just as the growth in international student mobility has been driven by narratives of social and professional prestige through ‘western’ education, and possibilities of permanent migration (Baas 2019) into Australia, so new narratives around the lived experiences of international students informed by the restrictions on international and local mobilities are now shaping the future of the international student mobility; and on a broader scale, international education itself (Marginson 2020). These new narratives this paper argues should be around international student wellbeing. To find out how the COVID-19 global health crisis is bringing about a new paradigm in which to conceptualise and theorise international student mobility, this paper relies on a data gathered before and during the pandemic. These include interview data from 60 international students collected in 2013, survey results from 6,699 international students in 2015 and interview data from 17 international students collated from two separate projects from 2020 to 2021. This paper thus suggests that the COVID-19 global health crisis and its impact on not only the international student lived experience but on student expectations and aspirations, have fundamentally changed. Here this paper proposes that migration and mobility studies need to consider a ‘wellbeing turn’ as a necessary consideration in international student mobility research.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, education institutions, international education stakeholders (e.g., education agents) as well as aspiring international students were faced with an unexpected global health emergency which halted any kind of international mobility. While migration and mobility scholars attempted to make sense of this global immobility, localized mobility restrictions to hinder the spread of COVID-19 were fundamentally reshaping the lived experiences, expectations and aspirations of international students themselves. While the pandemic in Australia heralded temporary hardships, restrictions and stresses, there are also fundamental long-term implications to international student mobility scholarship. Just as the growth in international student mobility has been driven by narratives of social and professional prestige through ‘western’ education, and possibilities of permanent migration (Baas 2019) into Australia, so new narratives around the lived experiences of international students informed by the restrictions on international and local mobilities are now shaping the future of the international student mobility; and on a broader scale, international education itself (Marginson 2020). These new narratives this paper argues should be around international student wellbeing. To find out how the COVID-19 global health crisis is bringing about a new paradigm in which to conceptualise and theorise international student mobility, this paper relies on a data gathered before and during the pandemic. These include interview data from 60 international students collected in 2013, survey results from 6,699 international students in 2015 and interview data from 17 international students collated from two separate projects from 2020 to 2021. This paper thus suggests that the COVID-19 global health crisis and its impact on not only the international student lived experience but on student expectations and aspirations, have fundamentally changed. Here this paper proposes that migration and mobility studies need to consider a ‘wellbeing turn’ as a necessary consideration in international student mobility research.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, education institutions, international education stakeholders (e.g., education agents) as well as aspiring international students were faced with an unexpected global health emergency which halted any kind of international mobility. While migration and mobility scholars attempted to make sense of this global immobility, localized mobility restrictions to hinder the spread of COVID-19 were fundamentally reshaping the lived experiences, expectations and aspirations of international students themselves. While the pandemic in Australia heralded temporary hardships, restrictions and stresses, there are also fundamental long-term implications to international student mobility scholarship. Just as the growth in international student mobility has been driven by narratives of social and professional prestige through ‘western’ education, and possibilities of permanent migration (Baas 2019) into Australia, so new narratives around the lived experiences of international students informed by the restrictions on international and local mobilities are now shaping the future of the international student mobility; and on a broader scale, international education itself (Marginson 2020). These new narratives this paper argues should be around international student wellbeing. To find out how the COVID-19 global health crisis is bringing about a new paradigm in which to conceptualise and theorise international student mobility, this paper relies on a data gathered before and during the pandemic. These include interview data from 60 international students collected in 2013, survey results from 6,699 international students in 2015 and interview data from 17 international students collated from two separate projects from 2020 to 2021. This paper thus suggests that the COVID-19 global health crisis and its impact on not only the international student lived experience but on student expectations and aspirations, have fundamentally changed. Here this paper proposes that migration and mobility studies need to consider a ‘wellbeing turn’ as a necessary consideration in international student mobility research.
Keywords
international students
mobility
pandemic
wellbeing
