International By Design or International(-ised) By Experience: Tne Students Challenging Knowledge Hierarchies

In this session, I will reflect on how knowledge hierarchies are challenged and shaped by unpacking selected examples of intra-regional student mobility and innovative TNE arrangements from South East Asia and the Middle East. By analysing these examples, I am hoping to make visible the complexities that describe the students involved in these regional TNE arrangements and their experiences. Take, for example, international branch campuses that enrol both national and international students, or franchise degrees which, whilst operating from a specific national location, recruit regional students and offer a regional rather than a ‘Western’ curriculum. As these examples suggest, we need a range of ways of capturing the complexities of: who moves where and why; which institutions are stretched out into global and regional spaces, which institutional programmes are localised and what are their effects on the students., and what students do to mitigate these effects. And while we are thinking about these effects, we also need to consider what actually moves, whether it is the students, or rather educational ideas, institutions and/or the identities of the students – and why and what narratives, at the level of the individual, institution and government better capture the student who is involved in all this? By debating these questions, I wish to challenge the notion of an international student by design (i.e. to begin to explore whether it is appropriate to think of all students undertaking international education along the lines of their international characteristics per se - that is, coming from the Global South to the Global North to study the ‘Western’ curriculum, or paying international fees and usually requiring a visa and physical mobility across borders). I argue that the idea of an international or mobile student by design simply does not apply any more.