Editorial Pluralizing Educational Mobilities: Towards a More Equitable and Inclusive Discourse

This special issue on pluralizing educational mobilities was conceptualized by active contributors to two networks: the Critical Internationalization Studies Network (CISN) and the Global Collective for Study Abroad Researchers and Administrators (GCSARA). These groupings were established with inherently “pluralizing” intentions, respectively, to “reimagin[e] dominant patterns of relationship, representation, and resource distribution in the internationalization of education” (Critical Internationalization Studies Network, n.d.) and to “promote [study abroad] research, and its dissemination, that draws on alternative epistemologies and situated cultural understandings” (GCSARA, n.d.). Both these networks, and others like them, have flourished in recent years precisely because the unexplored terrain that opens up when we “imagine [educational mobility and] internationalization otherwise” is vast, as a result of the naturalization and entrenchment, over many decades, of dominant discourses and practices that have severely limited the way in which this area of human endeavour has been conceived and organized (Castiello-Gutiérrez et al., 2023). As noted in our call for papers, of late “there has been a critical turn in international education scholarship (including education abroad), placing a stronger focus on issues of equity and inclusion, which trains a decolonial lens on research and practice around international mobilities.” Recently, this turn has significantly “pluralized” some zones of discourse that might be considered mainstream in international education practice and enquiry, so that well-established organizations, such as NAFSA: Association of International Educators or The Forum on Education Abroad, now have growing bibliographies of research and practical resources that reflect ever more critical and diverse viewpoints. Other work published in the last 5 years, such as the Routledge Studies in Global Student Mobility Series, now numbering fourteen volumes with titles such as Inequalities in Study Abroad and Student Mobility (Kommers & Bista, 2021) and Critical Perspectives on Equity and Social Mobility in Study Abroad (Glass & Gesing, 2022), has both opened out the field of vision and nuanced the discourse by incorporating more scholarship from non-Anglophone contexts and by democratizing the production of such scholarship across a wider range of roles (scholar, practitioner, participant, host, mediator). Nonetheless, whilst many researchers and practitioners in the field may increasingly find consensus in the need to reconfigure internationally mobile education, both conceptually and in practice, the obstacles remain formidable and the inequities stubbornly ingrained: by and large, the privileged retain their privilege, even as it is increasingly questioned from within as well as from without. It could not be otherwise, because the inequities are structural: student mobility is a function of the global tertiary education system, in which settler-colonial interests largely continue to prevail and, in many instances, are being reinscribed by the anti-intellectual populist ideologies that have proliferated recently (Douglass, 2021). As a result, it continues to be the case—though to a somewhat lesser degree than a decade ago—that “study abroad research is still disproportionately generated in a small number of university systems in the global-North sending nations of shorter-term study abroad and is still overwhelmingly centered on students of those countries” (Craig, 2022, p. 66). We might now add the nuance that this attention is “centered on students of and in those countries,” as the experiences of international students from without move into the mainstream in the primary research-generating locales of the Global North. As guest editors, we acknowledge our own privileged location in this global matrix: we would not be welcome guests without the capital conferred by our position in institutions that all, to varying degrees, participate in the rigged game of prestige and power entailed by the dominant globalized system of higher education. Nonetheless, we make bold to assert the validity of this small contribution to pluralization …