International Students and Education

This page lists selected resources that explore the intersection of language, race, and nationality, with a focus on how this intersection impacts the experiences of international students. A number of the resources also have relevance for the experience of racialized minorities in educational and other institutions.

Why a Theme on International Students and Education?

Higher education is one of the “commodities” in our contemporary world that transcends national borders. Many students at the university level choose to pursue their undergraduate or (post)graduate degrees in an overseas institution whose language of instruction and campus life is not their first. While the accomplishments of these international students are considerable – they are, after all,  functioning at a high-level in a second (third, fourth…) language and in many cases a different writing system – the special circumstances and potential of these students often seem to pass under the administrative and instructional radar of their institutions. Ironically, these same international students constitute a critical source of income for their host universities, sometimes making it possible for colleges and universities to support domestic students who would otherwise be unable to afford increasingly high tuition fees.

The situation of international students is particularly difficult in Anglophone institutions of higher education, given the often unquestioned monolingual ideology that operates more generally in countries such as Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. The Language, Culture and Justice Hub is currently exploring how international students fare in predominantly Anglophone institutions through its project Multilingual Life on a Monolingual Campus: the linguistic experiences of international students in English language-medium universities. Brandeis University is partnering with Macquarie University in Australia and the University of Birmingham in the UK to investigate this important topic on three continents. 

Resources

Click on the type of resource below to explore scholarly publications, reports, blogposts, commentaries and more. 

To learn about conceptual and methodological approaches to research about international students, visit a website dedicated to this area of inquiry, led primarily by researchers at the University of Manchester in the UK: https://researchintlstudents.com