Research seminar: Global Crises as Catalysts: International Student and Post-graduate Mobility Patterns

During the last two years, the covid19 pandemic has changed everyday lives and future outlooks of people across the world. From soaring death rates and health systems under serious pressure to national lockdowns and remote working conditions, people have had to reconsider previous ways of life and adapt to new normals. As a catalyst for change, the covid19 pandemic share traits with other recent critical disjunctures, for example Brexit, the climate crisis, the financial crash of 2008, and the so-called war on terror. Migrant populations have proven particularly vulnerable during such crises. This applies to settled immigrant populations who do not necessarily possess the required economic, social, or linguistic capital to access relevant information from the authorities and/or who are in legally precarious situations. Likewise, migrants are subject to national and international regulatories that are often tightened in periods of crises and tend to protect national citizens. On the one hand, student and highly skilled migrants constitute comparatively privileged categories of mobile people. Yet, decisions to migrate for education or a profession are often part of long-term strategies and embedded in uneven global mobility regimes. In this workshop, we wish to use global crises as a prism to understanding mobility patterns among international students and post-graduates, including decisions about routes and destinations, the process of information gathering and evaluation, the global mapping and remapping of opportunities and obstacles. We invite presentations of empirical case studies of international student mobility and post-graduate (job) trajectories during and after global crises. We welcome work in progress and diverse formats of presentation. Organised by Helene Ilkjær, DPU and Karen Valentin, DPU