International student mobilities in a contagion: (Im)mobilising higher education?

Abstract

This article reflects on the possible effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on international student mobilities and higher education systems. Celebrated as a ‘success’ story of a mutually beneficial globalisation, international higher education as we have known it is unravelling and reassembling. We offer an overview of the material changes and public discourses that are reframing student mobilities and higher education from three Anglophone positions involving Australia, Singapore, and New Zealand. The authors interrogate the amplified role of digital infrastructures in remaking international higher education, through border management practices and digital learning strategies. We outline changes at the urban scale that are starting to take hold from the stasis in student mobilities. We also speculate on emerging modalities of international higher education and their accompanying economies of opportunities and vulnerabilities. Our reflections take seriously calls to understand the wide-reaching implications of an invisible, border-crossing microbe, and interrupt the impulse to resurrect what came before the pandemic. It is in this spirit of thoughtful reflection to stop rebuilding ‘more of the same’ that we interrogate novel border rationalities and market making, which are being called on in work to govern space–time and subjects in a fragile post-COVID world.