Educational Migration in the Post-Pandemic World: Exploring Continuities and Discontinuities

The COVID-19 pandemic drastically halted educational migration that had been rapidly growing since the 2000s. Although countries around the world are now beginning to open their borders to migrants, the landscape of educational migration seems to have fundamentally changed since the onset of the pandemic. Geopolitically, international cooperation gave way to the deepening division between great powers, such as the United States, Russia, China, and the European Union. Technologically, digital transformation has penetrated more and more areas of society, including educational institutions, shifting the locus of social life from physical mobility to digital connectivity. Bio-politically, too, migration has become an ever more critical site for managing public health risks and policing "national borders" both materially and symbolically. All these macro-institutional transformations in the post-pandemic world seem to counter the pre-pandemic logic of globalization -- international cooperation, physical mobility, and open borders -- that fueled educational migration. As pandemic-related restrictions are easing today, how are educational institutions and migrants responding? Are they inventing new strategies and practices? Or do they retain old ones and, if so, how do they combine old and new strategies and practices? This session welcomes empirical papers from all regions of the world that explore post-pandemic continuities and discontinuities in educational migration from macro-institutional, meso-organizational, and micro-individual perspectives.