Exposed Challenges, Emerging Opportunities

On the global level, mobility of international students is

increasingly in flux, and news reports indicate rising tensions and more and

more unsafe environment for international students. Both local and

transnational realities demand that our research and scholarship transcend

conventional frameworks, disciplinary boundaries, and apolitical framing.

We need broader, bolder visions. In particular, we must pursue our

scholarship with the understanding that international students are not just a

product of the modern “market,” nor, indeed, should they be seen as the

byproduct of nation formation. Before there was the current idea of the

market of international education and even before nations became the most

dominant unit of social organization, people moved to new places to

broaden their knowledge and enrich their experience, to exchange ideas

between home and host communities, to make sense of life and society. If

need (or greed) for food and space led to border-crossing that involved

conflicts, mobility driven by curiosity and exchange of ideas has historically

mitigated ignorance, fear, and violence--rather than magnify or facilitate it.

Unfortunately, in modern times, regulation of bodies, then of knowledge and

its exchange, by nation states (which have somehow come to be defined by

conflict and competition) are increasingly clashing against common

humanistic goals among nations, against globalization and against the

advancement of knowledge in the interest of all. In fact, education has often

been used to brainwash and intimidate, regulate and restrict the freedom of bodies and minds.