TY - JOUR
T1 - The precarious path of student migrants
T2 - education, debt, and transnational migration among Indian youth
AU - Thomas, Susan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2017/8/18
Y1 - 2017/8/18
N2 - The drive to internationalise campuses is an important dimension of the globalised neoliberal university, and it is leading to large numbers of students crossing national borders to pursue their education. As key global consumers of higher education, middle-class students from India migrating overseas to study are at the centre of this trend. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted at a public university in New York, this article considers how notions of obligation become critical to these students’ movements, their practices of place-making, and their futures. I use the term educational debts to capture the different forms of indebtedness that not only structure these young people’s educational migration, but also inform the sensibility shaping their negotiations of everyday life as overseas students. Attending specifically to their experiences with work, both the part-time labour they provide on campus and their search for work after they receive their degrees, I argue that educational debts position them precariously in the linkages between global education and labour markets. Elucidating how particular experiences of precarity are produced through the process of educational migration, this article offers insights into the differences that exist among the transnational class formations of Indian high-skilled migrant populations in the neoliberal era.
AB - The drive to internationalise campuses is an important dimension of the globalised neoliberal university, and it is leading to large numbers of students crossing national borders to pursue their education. As key global consumers of higher education, middle-class students from India migrating overseas to study are at the centre of this trend. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted at a public university in New York, this article considers how notions of obligation become critical to these students’ movements, their practices of place-making, and their futures. I use the term educational debts to capture the different forms of indebtedness that not only structure these young people’s educational migration, but also inform the sensibility shaping their negotiations of everyday life as overseas students. Attending specifically to their experiences with work, both the part-time labour they provide on campus and their search for work after they receive their degrees, I argue that educational debts position them precariously in the linkages between global education and labour markets. Elucidating how particular experiences of precarity are produced through the process of educational migration, this article offers insights into the differences that exist among the transnational class formations of Indian high-skilled migrant populations in the neoliberal era.
KW - Indian youth
KW - Student migration
KW - debt
KW - neoliberalism
KW - precarity
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U2 - 10.1080/1369183X.2017.1286970
DO - 10.1080/1369183X.2017.1286970
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85011589248
SN - 1369-183X
VL - 43
SP - 1873
EP - 1889
JO - Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
JF - Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
IS - 11
ER -