What is it about?
This article problematises the international student label by critically examining the mechanisms that actively portray international students as necessarily different, deficient, and uncritical. It broadly aims to tackle the following issues: (a) to challenge the underpinnings of the international label; (b) to uncover the role of neo-essentialist representations of cohorts of students labelled international in sustaining financial exploitation and deficit narratives; and (c) to criticise the current hyper-internationalisation strategy widely adopted by UK HEIs.
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Why is it important?
This is the first research that openly challenges the international label and substitutes it by “students labelled international”. Equally, this is the first paper that recommends to cap international tuition fees on account of findings from students' narratives and statistics that reveal the unsustainability of the UK's higher education sector. Finally, the paper’s conceptual contribution includes a reference to the idea of hyper-internationalisation.
Perspectives
This article is an urgent call to seriously look at the experiences and realities of students labelled international as a pressing matter that needs to be resolved to part ways with the current deficit discourses and market-driven forms of dehumanisation that students labelled international are subject to.
Ramzi Merabet
University of Leeds
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Students we label international: an urgent call to reconceptualise research with international students, Equality Diversity and Inclusion An International Journal, May 2024, Emerald,
DOI: 10.1108/edi-01-2024-0048.
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