Suchergebnisse

The movement of international students represents an increasing component of contemporary population mobilities. Like other forms of migration, international student mobility takes place through a complex assemblage of actors and networks, including origin and destination states, educational institutions, families, friends and communities, and of course students themselves. In the midst of these arrangements education agents appear to occupy a pivotal position, serving as a bridge between student origins and study destinations in a manner that enables multiple movements across educational and geographic divides. Establishing and maintaining this important position in international student mobilities is a complex endeavour that requires agents to bridge the gap between a solely profit-oriented education industry and the social lives of students and their families. This paper investigates the position of agents in student mobilities by focusing on the development of export education activities since the early 1990s in New Zealand and the changing relationships of agents with the state, education providers and students. I trace the emergence of agents to the early liberalization of student mobility and educational provision but also note how agents became increasingly incorporated into a more formalized education industry as later governments engaged in more direct intervention and regulation of student flows and educational quality. To broaden this general overview of the role of agents the paper focuses on the specific activities and relationships of agents involved in the movement of South Korean international students. The paper concludes by highlighting the need for research on agents and other intermediaries to focus in more detail on the manner in which these actors mediate different sorts of relationships, between migration/education industries and migrant/student social networks as well as between changing state liberalization and intervention and emerging industry formations. (Pac Aff/GIGA)

AbstractInternational education is a fundamentally transnational project. It relies on the movement of individuals or knowledge across national borders, disturbs the centrality of the nation‐state in educational reproduction, and is facilitated by economic and social networks that act as bridges between countries of origin and education. In this article, I address this latter point through reference to research conducted with South Korean international students in Auckland, New Zealand. In particular, I discuss the emergence of transnational social and economic activities that are facilitating the movement of international students from South Korea to Auckland — activities that might usefully be understood as forming 'bridges to learning'. These include the activities of education agencies, immigrant entrepreneurs and the interpersonal relationships with which many students engage in the negotiation of their transnational lives. In a broader sense I illustrate how the emerging mobilities of international students cannot be viewed as independent of other phenomena but must be seen as embedded within transnational processes that take place at different geographic and social scales.

Contemporary policy approaches to 'cultural diversity' are increasingly focusing on 'the urban', marking a considerable departure from configurations like biculturalism and multiculturalism in which the space of the nation was viewed as the key arena for the making of diverse and cohesive societies. In this context, this paper analyses the Intercultural City Project (ICP), a multicity planning initiative developed by the private consultancy Comedia, focusing on the ICP's deployment in Auckland, New Zealand, where it was used to rethink issues surrounding diversity and urban planning. The analysis focuses on three key issues that emerge in the ICP: the targeting of cultural diversity and interaction; the rescaled 'urban' version of diversity; and the connections between this model of diversity and neo-liberal urban policies.

This volume makes an important and unique contribution to scholarly understandings of migration and diversity through its focus on Asian contexts. Current scholarship and literature on processes of migration and the consequences of diversity is heavily concentrated on Western contexts and their concerns with "multiculturalism", "integration", "rights and responsibilities", "social cohesion", "social inclusion", and "cosmopolitanism". In contrast, there has been relatively little attention given to migration and growing diversity in Asian contexts which are constituted by highly distinct and varied histories, cultures, geographies, and political economies. This book fills this significant gap in the literature on migration studies with a concentrated focus on communities, cities and countries in the Asian region that are experiencing increased levels of population mobility and subsequent diversity. Not only does it offer analyses of the policies and processes of migration, it also addresses the outcomes and implications of migration and diversity – these include a focus on multiculturalism and citizenship in the Asian region, the emerging complex forms of governance in response to increased diversity, discussions of different settlement experiences, and the practices of everyday life and encounters in increasingly diverse locales