Student (Im)Mobilities: Revisiting the Politics of International and Internal Higher Education Movements in Milan, Italy

The social sciences have long employed the concept of mobility to analyse migration flows, albeit often with a mobility bias (Schewel 2020) that emphasises networks, interconnectivity and the free flow of people. Yet, sustained trends in mobility studies have called for rethinking mobility in light of its counterpart — immobility — revealing how different mobility regimes are unevenly distributed across the globe and segments of society (Glick and Salazar 2013). Within this framework, housing emerges as a crucial context through which (im)mobility regimes are experienced, reinforced, or contested. This paper applies the concept of regimes of (im)mobility to reflect on the lived experience of university students at the intersection of residential and social mobility in the Italian context, looking at the experiences of three subgroups of mobile students in the city of Milan: international students, non-local students coming from other Italian regions, and students who commute from their place of residence to attend university. It does so by contextualising their experiences within the residualisation of public student housing policies at the national and regional level, the growing financialisation of the student housing sector, and a longstanding policy-led privilege of homeownership over rent that has created a shrinking and highly polarised rental sector (Poggio 2005). Drawing on data from an annual survey on student housing conditions administered by the Interdepartmental Centre for Research-Action on University Student Housing (C.A.S.A.) of the University of Milan-Bicocca, alongside focus groups with students, we show that while institutional discourse and student housing providers increasingly promote a language around internationalisation thanks to borderless student communities, differential access to the city in the face of rising rental costs and insufficient student support constrains an increasingly large number of students into regimes of immobility, thus contributing to making Milan an elitist choice for study.