by Lisa Ruth Brunner and María E. Cervantes-Macías In January 2024, Canadian higher education was rocked by a two-year intake cap on post-secondary study permit applications, amounting to a 35% decrease from 2023 (IRCC, 2024a; 2024b). Given the sector’s dependency on differential international student tuition fees (Statistics Canada, 2022) and the highest proportion of international post-secondary enrollments globally (IIE, 2023), the potential impacts were stark. Institutions’ desire for international student funds had become insatiable, and, for decades, no stakeholders – including the provi ..read more

A research brief by Jason Lane, Jessica Schueller, and Christine Farrugia What is an ‘international student’? For most scholars and practitioners, the mainstream concept of an international student is defined by one’s nationality or visa status vis-a-vis their location of study. While there is no precise definition of ‘international student,’ they have been generally defined as those who leave their home country to pursue an education in a different country (Lane & Bhandari, 2014). A binary distinction was traditionally made between domestic students from the country where the university i ..read more

by Kalyani Unkule A year ago, my co-editors Jenna Mittelmeier, Sylvie Lomer, and I contributed an introduction to our then forthcoming edited volume “Research with International Students: Critical Conceptual and Methodological Considerations” (henceforth RIS) to this newsletter. Following the open-access release of this work, I aim to share reflections here on how this book might be used by researchers as well as those planning projects of this nature in the field and beyond.  RIS is not a how-to guide on designing research studies. Although each chapter concludes with practical suggestio ..read more

By Santiago Castiello-Gutiérrez, Jhuliane Evelyn da Silva, and Sharon Stein Note: An extended version of this essay was published in September of 2023 by the European Association for International Education (EAIE) as part of their 2023 Annual Conference Conversation Starter publication. We encourage you to read the six essays in the publication as they relate to our work in the CISN. In recent years, our field has begun to acknowledge that the benevolent discourse of internationalization as an inherently good or benign process is limited, and that it has been–despite our best intentions–built ..read more

A Practitioner Brief by Dr. Ryan M. Allen, Kafui Dzubey, and Yuki Miyoshi The United States has long been the leading destination for international students around the world, welcoming 948,519 of these students in the 2021/22 academic year (Institute of International Education, 2022). International students have been drawn to the diverse range of higher education institutions, from massive state universities to quaint liberal arts colleges and community colleges. The experiences of these students on US campuses vary widely depending on gender, race, ethnicity, class, and an array of individual ..read more

A Practitioner Brief by Dr. Ndidi Loretta Okeke and Dr. Andrea Rakushin Lee Mentorship is a relationship between the mentor and the mentee and has been used in various fields, including academia (Ertkorn & Braddock, 2020; Sargent & Rienties, 2022). The mentor provides advice and guidance to the mentees to help them grow, learn, and develop professionally (Reeves, 2023). Mentorship is a mutualistic relationship in which academic researchers formally or informally mentor one or a group of mentees to nurture their career and research development (Sargent & Rienties, 2022). Moreover, c ..read more

by Radomir Ray Mitic, University of North Dakota, United States;Takeshi Yanagiura, University of Tsukuba, Japan; and Yukikazu Hidaka, Independent Researcher, United States As critical researchers of the internationalization of higher education, we often face epistemological and methodological challenges when attempting to explain large-scale phenomena and challenge entrenched systems of power. The recent trend towards quantitative methods with a critical lens and a rejection of positivist paradigms with a purpose of transforming higher education practice has opened the door to large-scale empi ..read more

by Pii-Tuulia Nikula and Karen McBride The edited volume, Sustainable Education Abroad: Striving for Change, was published by The Forum on Education Abroad in March 2023 (McBride & Nikula, 2023). It belongs to the Standards in Action book series which highlights some of the challenges the field of education abroad is facing and proposes practical actions for the field to reinvent itself for the future. All of the books in this series address critical but under-explored perspectives, such as those associated with decolonization, inclusiveness, and the perspectives of HBCUs (Historically Bla ..read more

by Dr. Sharon Stein Last month, my book Unsettling the University: Confronting the Colonial Foundations of US Higher Education was published by Johns Hopkins University Press. The book traces how US universities were built on and continue to reproduce settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, and white supremacy, in material and epistemic ways. The common rituals of a book release tend to center and celebrate the individual author, which is something that makes me extremely uncomfortable in general, but especially so in the case of a book like this. I recognize the tensions of writing about the per ..read more

by Dr. Kalyani Unkule Part II This three-part article series aims to relate a new understanding of reconciliation with higher education internationalization practice, particularly study abroad, drawing on Anzaldúa and Keating’s (2002, p. 3) imagination of bridging as “the work of opening the gate to the stranger, within and without.” Part I discussed some of the challenges that reconciliation as a modality of transitional justice shares with higher education internationalization. Prominent critiques of standard practices deployed to achieve post-conflict reconciliation point to the need for em ..read more