Chapter 1 Situating the Research Problem

1.1 Introduction This thesis centres on investigating how the international university, through its marketing and promotion of international education, is responding to globalisation. It compares the discursive practices that define the Australian ‘brand’ of international education, with those of its two main competitors, the United Kingdom and the United States. More specifically, I examine how power and knowledge come together in promotional discourses to form particular constructions of student subjectivity and particular constructions of the international university. These practices are then analysed against the particularities of one consumer market, Singapore. Using multitextured ‘sets’ of data – consisting of promotional materials, policy statements, and interview data, I explore the new power/knowledge regimes emerging from the international university in the face of global and globalising processes. I inquire how these power/knowledge constellations are deployed in managing the nation-bound and supraterritorial tensions facing the international university. Do these power/knowledge regimes construct and reflect new ways of imagining the ‘other’? This chapter firstly introduces two key discourses which have been pivotal in shaping international education: the discourse of colonial modernity and the discourse of markets. I begin with a historical overview of international education starting from its premodern and colonial beginnings, to its present permutations as a geographically dispersed enterprise of markets with discernible nodes within circuits of demand and supply. Second, I describe the purpose of this research and outline the conceptual framework used in this study. Third, and in keeping with a poststructuralist position, I conclude this chapter with a brief autobiographical account of my history and its impact on my standpoint as a researcher in this study.

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1.2 Multiple Discourses, Multiple Meanings There is no consensus about what an international education means. Neither is there a commonly agreed set of criteria for what makes a university international. What is thinkable and sayable about international education, and the international university, is ultimately shaped by power relations. A common portrayal of international education constructs it as a global business made up of spatially dispersed networks of places, institutions, scholars, administrators and students. The principal actor in this network is the international university. Its international status is defined by an ability to draw income from a variety of international sources including international student fees, franchises, branch campuses, development assistance (‘aid’) consultancies and donations from overseas alumni. Spatial in its reach, the international university is equally dynamic in the ‘products’ and services it offers. It sells on-shore, full fee programmes in bricks and mortar institutions (‘facilities-based courses’) alongside ‘dot.edu’ digitised and virtualised courses. Its staff of marketing administrators and academics traverse selected parts of the globe to recruit new students and to deliver training programmes along with ‘just-in-time’, ‘any place, any time’ academic courses. It offers a vision of international education which is expounded in the politically neutral language of the ‘market’. The international university is a business, its students are customers who are rational, choice-exercising individuals, and its mission is to supply high quality educational services to both its domestic and international stakeholders. Above all, the international university must remain economically viable. International education is also related to something called ‘globalisation’. Although itself a contested term, globalisation is increasingly hailed as one of the reasons why we need ‘international education’ and international, ‘world class’ universities. Today nearly every Australian university claims for itself the status of ‘international’ and ‘world class’. The international university is called upon to respond to ‘new realities’ of globalisation although there is no consensus on what these new realities are, still less on ways of tackling them. One position is to steer the international university towards meeting the needs of the New Economy. To do so, the international university is being exhorted to be ‘internationally competitive’. Another position argues that governments and social institutions like universities can no longer conceptualize and manage their economic, administrative and intellectual duties and activities from within distinctive national territories. There are calls for the international university to achieve a balance between its international and national responsibilities by committing to a cosmopolitan scholarship (Halliday, 1999; Marginson, 1999; see also Pieterse and Parekh, 1995; Tierney, 2001). These changes demand ‘deep and complex’ engagements between the international university and global processes. They present the university with the opportunity to transcend the imperial tyrannies authored by its modernist predecessor, and to generate new engagements with the ‘other’1 while managing the ‘tyranny of the New’2. 1. The

‘other’ is a term which is used to refer to the opposite or opposed element in binary oppositions. (e.g., self/other, East/West and masculine/feminine) (Jary and Jary, 1995, p. 470).

2. see

Grossberg (1996, p. 133).

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Amidst this profusion of rhetoric and reality are media releases, policy documents and institutional reports celebrating international education as the “third largest service industry” which contributes A$4.083 billion to the Australian economy3. Similarly compelling are those pronouncements which estimate the worth of international education to the British economy at £ 8 billion4 and US$11 billion to the American economy5. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of ‘September 11’, international education has acquired new meanings. Following the attack on the World Trade Centre, the Vice-Chancellor of one Australian university declared, I can think of no better antidote to international terrorism as international education. It helps us to develop the international perspective and cross cultural sensitivity that are essential attributes of the effective citizen of the 21st century, and which gives us the skills and personal capacity to respond positively to globalization (Yerbury, 2001). No less ‘hopeful’ was this declaration from the Australian-based education broker, IDP Education on the role of international education in “making a critical contribution in developing global peace and understanding” (IDP, 2001b). The US-based Institute of International Education went further, linking international education with a ‘safer and more secure world’ and with a certain type of understanding: The aim of the terrorists who attacked this country on September 11 is not to change American foreign policy but to close our markets, minds and doors. ...When more international students are given the chance for meaningful study and opportunities to gain an appreciation of our society, there will be less hatred of America and misunderstanding of our values and way of life (Kaufman and Goodman, 2002). This introductory snapshot aims to draw attention to the arresting complexities and contradictions surrounding the discursive realm of international education. These are reflected in terms as diverse as ‘export services’, ‘national income’, ‘global peace’, ‘open markets, minds and doors’, ‘effective 21st century citizenship’, and appeals for ‘less hatred and more understanding of our values’. Before proceeding further, some clarification is required about the terms used in this study. In reviewing the literature, it is obvious that international education is defined in contradictory ways. International education is most commonly associated with the recruitment and enrolment of international students (see Bennell and Pearce, 1998, p. 2). It is also used to refer to transnational education, the broad range of educational activities that cross national borders (Clyne, Marginson and Woock, 2001, p. 111). When used interchangeably with ‘global education’, international education describes any number of fields from peace studies to studies on ecological sustainability. Recently in reflection of a growing trend, international

3. This

represents revenue earned from international student fees and student expenditure on goods and services during their stay in Australia (IDP, 2001a).

4. British 5. see

Council (2000).

Moreno (2000).

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education is being used to refer to various online education initiatives (see Farquhar, 1999, p. 6). The term ‘internationalisation’, on the other hand, usually appears in institutional mission statements and institutional policies. The Australian Vice-Chancellor’s Committee (AVCC)6, offers this vague definition in its International Relations Strategic Plan, “Internationalisation is the complex of processes that gives universities an international dimension” (Hamilton, 1998). Within the context of Australian higher education, the OECD’s definition of internationalisation has been widely adopted: “the process of integrating an international/intercultural dimension in the teaching, research and service of the institution” (Knight and de Wit, 1995, p. 15). On the surface of it, this definition appears adequate: it is open-ended and conceptualises internationalisation as a process which is never-ending, always incomplete and unfinished rather than having a discernible end point (de Wit, 1999). However, as I discuss in Chapter Four, its weaknesses lies in its inherent generality and ambiguity. It is unclear just what constitutes an international/intercultural dimension, which is as likely to include the trite and superficial as the profound and complex. A more comprehensive definition is offered by Francis (1993, unpaged), “internationalisation is a process where education prepares the community for successful participation in an increasingly interdependent world...fosters global understanding and develops skills for effective living and working in a diverse world”. Similarly, Sadiki (2001) associates internationalisation with a core education aimed at preparing recipients for “global community” and which has as its central feature, ‘curricular plurality’7. A historical analysis of the movement and transmigration of scholars and students suggests that international education is neither a novel nor a recent phenomena. However, the types of exchanges taking place at this historical moment are discernibly different from those of earlier eras.

1.3 Early Antecedents of International Education As empires and civilizations have risen and fallen, the spatial locations of teaching and learning centres have shifted accordingly. Perhaps it is the fashion for each age and each empire to make its own claims to novelty and to dismiss past continuities. Today, with the centres of teaching and research clustered around the North Atlantic Rim, it is almost inconceivable for many to imagine an era when the Arabic centres of Baghdad, Damascus, Cordoba and Byzantium attracted western European scholar-students (see La Goff, 1993, in Ma Rhea, 2002). These pre-modern educational exchanges were arguably different in quality, from those that took place during modernity. Their scope and diffusion were limited by the absence of sophisticated disseminating technologies while their rationales were qualitatively different from rationales for later educational exchanges. However, some similarities can also be assumed with contemporary educational exchanges: they produced hybrid outcomes.

6. The

AVCC is a major stakeholder in the Australian higher education field. It describes its role as ‘advancing higher education through voluntary, cooperative and coordinated action’ (AVCC, 2002).

7. Sadiki

(2001).

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Here, Said’s (1993) salutary comment on the permeability of cultures and the inevitability of cross-cultural exchanges, is worth keeping in mind: Far from being unitary or monolithic or autonomous things, cultures actually assume more foreign elements, differences... than they consciously exclude (p.15). Educational exchanges in the early and late modern eras, took place against a background of colonization and imperialism by European states8. Education was largely regarded as an investment to consolidate colonial power and subsequently exported by colonial centres to their colonies (see Willinsky, 1998, p. 89). The celebrated Macaulay Minute declared its rationale for education in the colonies with an imperial certitude,”to create a class of persons Indian in looks and colour but English in tastes and opinions, in morals and intellects”(Macaulay in Loombia, 1998, p. 85). Education was to become a key discursive site for social engineering, a goal which would retain its legitimacy post-independence, as the former colonies plunged headlong into ‘development’ and modernisation9 often at the cost of violating civil liberties (Davies, Nandy and Sardar, 1993, pp. 83-84). Education’s complicity with the enterprise of empire has been well documented notably by postcolonial theorists (see Gikandi, 1996; Loombia, 1998; Nandy, 1983; Pieterse and Parekh, 1995; Tikly, 1999; Tuhiwai-Smith, 1999; Willinsky, 1998). Less well researched is the extent to which the educational imperatives of colonial modernity continue to be materially and discursively translated into contemporary assertions of international education. There is also little research into contemporary expressions of international education which debate whether globalisation represents a rupture from the continuity of colonial modernity. A brief digression into international education’s discursive links with colonization follows. Nandy (1983, pp. x-xi) identifies two waves of colonization. The first wave is labelled the era of ‘bandit kings’ and is associated with unfettered economic and human exploitation. In the 19th century, this phase was replaced by an era of ‘philosopher kings’ which oversaw the ‘colonization of the educated mind’. Nandy argues that it is this second wave of colonization which has survived the demise of empires and the inauguration of independent political states. The tenacious hold of a colonial imagination has been sustained by a desire on the parts of anti-colonial politicians and intellectuals to “beat the West at its own game” (p. xi-xiii). Nandy’s analysis puts colonial education firmly in the discursive domain of modernization. He views it as perpetuating a ‘faulty’ politico--economic template, based on an ontology anchored in anthropocentric doctrines of progress, the use of science and technology to satisfy an insatiable demand for cumulative growth and a privileging of the hyper-masculine subject. 8. While

recognising that the national and individual desire for a ‘modern’ education is not limited to those countries occupied by ‘western’ colonial powers, I will restrict my discussions to these countries. However, I acknowledge that colonization is not a wholly West versus East phenomena. Examples of ‘East-East’ colonization include Korea which was a colony of Japan from 1910 to 1945. For much of 18th and 19th centuries the northern parts of peninsular Malaya were colonies of Siam (Thailand). Presently, the Free Tibet movement would consider Tibet to be colonized by China. Similar analogies can be drawn about Indonesia’s annexation of East Timor and Irian Jaya

9. Modernisation

is a general term which is used to describe the socioeconomic changes generated by scientific and technological discoveries, industrialization, population movements, urbanisation, and modern nation-state formation. (Sarup, 1993, p. 131).

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Whether or not one agrees with Nandy’s bleak view of the legacies of modernity and the continuing dominance of modernization theory within educational missions, what is relevant to this study is his positioning of the anti-colonial movement as active participants in reproducing, disseminating and legitimating key ideas of colonial modernity. His work casts doubt about the extent of the rupture from a colonial modernity in consumer markets like Singapore. It raises the possibility of whether postcolonial education systems have retained a desire for modernization’s ideas, ideals and imaginations in a bid to prove their nation’s intellectual, economic and technological capacities. I will re-visit this hypothesis in Chapters Four, Five and Six, when I examine macro- and micro-level practices that produce particular constructions of international education in both production and consumption sites. Importantly, Nandy’s work takes the educated colonised subject to be a participant in the profoundly complex “moral and cognitive venture” of colonization, and not as a “gullible, simple-hearted victim” (ibid, p. xv). Nandy was not writing specifically about the educational encounter, however, his identification of multiplicity and contradiction in the shaping of the educated [colonised] subject is useful for this study’s inquiry into the subjectifications of international students. Nandy’s work and the work of Stuart Hall (1996) alert us to the prevalence of multiplicity, contradiction and disjuncture within the transcultural, transnational encounter. They caution against the use of simple binaries, arguing that to do so will involve falling back into the discursive logic of the colonial project, with its ritualised binaries and its essentialisation of difference (see also Pieterse and Parekh,1995). Given that the political independence of many colonized states coincided with the Cold War era, what emerged was an intensified push to steer educational exchanges towards the foreign policy goals and political agendas of both First and Second World powers. A complex configuration of political, economic, national and ideological interests coalesced to produce policy initiatives such as the Colombo Plan and the Fulbright Scholarship scheme. The Colombo Plan signalled Australia’s first major engagement with international students. In the next section, I build on the work of Alexander and Rizvi (1993) and Auletta (2000), to argue that the Plan’s discursive logic continues to exercise a hold on the imagination of the contemporary international university.

1.3.1

The Colombo Plan

An initiative of seven Commonwealth donors, including Australia and Britain, and a number of non-Commonwealth donors (e.g., Japan and the United States) the Colombo Plan was an attempt to foster regional stability and curtail the spread of communism among the newly independent Asian countries. The Plan assumed that successful students would return home to constitute a technological and administrative elite, effectively a Westernised middle-class intelligentsia, who would be supportive of their western benefactors (Alexander and Rizvi, 1993, pp. 9-10; Auletta, 2000, pp. 48-49; Rizvi, 1997, pp. 16-17; Wicks, 1972, pp 10-13). The Plan was part of a broader ethnocentric and instrumentalist discursive machinery aimed, primarily at securing political and diplomatic policy goals. These goals took precedence over the educational needs of the region (Alexander and Rizvi, 1993; Rizvi, 1998, pp 5-6). Moreover, as Auletta (2000) argues, based on her analysis of archival sources, by 1963, there was a gradual

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move in some sections of the Australian bureaucracy to link aid with ‘free’ access to regional markets. By the time the Plan was subsumed into the present development cooperation programmes, an estimated 300,000 students from 26 different countries had been educated under its aegis (Brown, 1993). The outcomes that emerged through educational experiences offered by aid programmes like the Colombo Plan were typically ambivalent and uncertain, with a mix of benefits and costs. Although official accounts espoused the success of the Colombo Plan, there was some disquiet about the extent of its success in contributing to the economic development of recipient countries. Its critics pointed to the availability of cheap labour rather than to the presence of a Western educated middle and professional class as the cause of national economic success (Taylor (1965) and Drakakis-Smith (1992), in Brown, 1993, pp.126-127; Alexander and Rizvi, 1993, pp. 18-19) A 1968 study of Malaysian and Singaporean recipients of the Australian sponsored Colombo Plan scholarships, for example, found that 35% failed to gain formal qualifications. The failure rate was attributed to: “poor selection procedures, lack of counselling services, and poor knowledge of personal background and culture” (Hodgkin 1968, in Brown 1993, p. 130). Besides the ‘deficits’ of the scholarship recipients, there were other concerns about the appropriateness of international educational exchange programmes: The training of young Asians outside their cultural context...is in many cases irrelevant...and opposed to conditions in their own environment. Education outside is at best only half an education...it leads to possible emasculation of those involved... (Tregonning 1967, in Wicks, 1972, p. 14). The Plan was also held responsible for a ‘brain drain’, by reducing the critical mass of skilled professionals in the newly independent countries. An opposing view pointed to a ‘brain overflow’ whereby qualified returnees left their home countries after failing to find jobs suited to their qualifications (Rao, 1979). These debates reflected and articulated a tension between notions of private and public good, evident in the individualisation of ambitions and opposing commitments to national/regional goals. Importantly, they raise questions about the spatialization of power/knowledge networks, and the extent to which the spread of these networks have transcended the putative centres and peripheries which existed during colonial modernity. Although constructed as a ‘gift’, the Plan was also fuelled by complex and conflicting rationales, some of which remain in force today. By providing a ‘gift’ of education to its neighbours, the implicit hope was of subverting hostilities including territorial ambitions from ‘the north’. The Plan, thus sought to educate the ‘other’ in an Australian image. To the extent that the Plan was motivated by a national anxiety of the ‘other’, it was discursively allied to a xenophobic and racist discourse (see Alexander and Rizvi, 1993, p. 17; Rizvi, 1997, pp. 14-15). The existence of enemy stereotypes and a fear of ‘the other’ have been a long-time feature of Australia’s nation-building discourse (see Castles and Miller, 1998; Fiske, Hodge & Turner, 1987; Turner 1994). The discourse of a White Australia with its assumptions of ethnocultural 7

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superiority was not only hugely influential for the first fifty years of Australian statehood; it has also shown itself to be resilient by reappearing periodically in community attitudes, a point I will re-visit in Chapter Four when I examine public discourses on international students. An interesting recent development is the Colombo Plan’s resurrection as the Virtual Colombo Plan. It has received significant media coverage as the captions below suggest: Aid goes to cyberspace, Reaching out virtually, Plan to throw net over poverty and Industry benefits in virtual aid plan10. These news captions are illustrative, on the one hand, of a national desire to re-capture the objectification of education as a ‘gift’. On the other hand, the Virtual Colombo Plan can also be read as another example of the global trade in the business of aid. It reflects the embeddedness of educational aid programmes in, what Thrift (2001) refers to as, the ‘cultural circuits of capital’. Educational aid is now a multibillion dollar business and its discursive links with the for-profit e-learning industry, is a further confirmation of education’s reconfiguration into a globally traded service. I want to expand on one key point from this brief historical account of student flows and educational exchanges: there are indications that ‘events’ such as colonialism and the Cold War refracted the production of knowledge by influencing what could be thought, written and researched. However and more importantly, their discursive effects have extended into the postcolonial and post-Cold War phases, resulting in a continuing romance between national education systems and the modernist imaginary which characterised the colonial project. The desire to engage with modernity’s apparatuses and accoutrements is grounded in the broader goals of recovering and retaining national sovereignty (Loombia, 1998, pp. 57-69; see also Nandy, 1983). While engagements with the project of colonial modernity have yielded some productive outcomes, and the case of Singapore is particularly instructive, the question now is whether this vision is appropriate for a global and globalising era. For education, the significant challenge is how to decolonise the imagination in preparation for a democratic and humane globalisation (see Nandy, 1983; Pieterse and Parekh,1995; Tikly, 2001). An alternative perspective to educational exchanges is found in accounts which describe these exchanges in politically neutral terms such as those of Knight and de Wit’s (1995) which appear in OECD monographs on internationalisation. While acknowledging, that the “nationally-oriented” focus of earlier expressions of international education were associated with imperialising and colonizing imperatives, they see few continuities with current interpretations and assertions of international education (p.8). I will provide a more detailed analysis of the deficiencies of this approach when I discuss the OECD’s position on internationalisation in detail in Chapter Four. So far, I have described the postcolonial perspective on colonial and post-independence educational exchanges. Discursively packaged as a gift to be transmitted from educated, civilized coloniser to culturally and educationally deficient colonised subject, colonial 10. Reaching

out virtually (Australian, 2002). Plan to throw net over poverty (Australian, 2001b). Aid goes to cyberspace (Australian, 2001c). Industry benefits in virtual aid plan (Australian, 2001d).

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education’s ostensible function was to serve as a political investment. The consequences for both giver and receiver were unanticipated and ambiguous, resulting in political independence on the one hand, at same time as facilitating the continuation of a colonized imagination. This raises an important inquiry for this study: whether and to what extent the discursive links between colonial modernity and the international education enterprise are existent. In other words, has globalisation facilitated a reciprocal series of exchanges to subvert the asymmetries of knowledge and power which characterised earlier educational exchanges? I conclude this section with a statement from Nandy, written almost twenty years ago, but extraordinarily prescient for the educational mission facing international education today: ... Ultimately, modern oppression as opposed to the traditional oppression, is not an encounter between the self and the enemy, the rulers and the ruled...It is a battle between the dehumanized self and objectified enemy... The White Sahib may turn out to be defined not by skin colour but by political and social choice (ibid, pp. xv-xvi). Having briefly discussed the postcolonial position on educational exchanges, it is timely now to examine a second ensemble of discourses which has been influential in shaping the discursive field of international education, the discourse of markets. What is notable about the markets discourse is its internal diversity. One set of views has equated international education with export profits. Another resonating view has been to see the educational ‘products’ sold in the global marketplace as a vast improvement on the limp and posturing colonial pedagogy offered to the colonised elites in the ‘aid’ era of international education. This view regards educational markets as having facilitated a clean break from the neocolonial impulses of modernity. Where its predecessor, the modern university was noted for its service to the ideological and imperializing imperatives of the nation state, this position considers the contemporary international university as a dynamic agent of a postcolonial form of globalisation (Scott, 1998, pp.123; 126-127). A less optimistic view sees international education markets as a form of ‘multinationalization of education’ where the profit motive has subordinated attempts to remove traces of neocolonialism from educational products (Altbach, 1999b). Given the divergence in views, a brief discussion of education markets is warranted to establish whether international education markets, through their conceptualisation of international students as customers, have been successful in introducing alternative discursive practices to earlier neocolonial, nation-centred practices.

1.4 Education Markets and International Education In the past two decades, the trust invested in markets by politicians, policy makers and institutional leaders has effectively seen their objectification to an almost sage-like status. The market is depicted as having emotions and feelings evident in descriptors such as “the market is nervous, excited, bullish, energetic” (Henry, Lingard, Rizvi and Taylor, 1999, p. 87). Markets are also discursively constructed as mediators and managers. It is not uncommon for financial journalists to open with such comments as’the markets will reward/punish this move’ as a

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way of explaining the movement of national currencies or the efficacy of business decisions by companies. Such a stance ignores the fact that markets are embedded in the sociocultural and political fabrics of nations and communities or in Ball’s words, “markets are neither natural nor neutral phenomena, they are socially and politically constructed” (1994, p.111). They are best understood as a set of behavioural relations rather than as concrete structures with predictable processes and outcomes (Marginson, 1997a, pp. 29-30). This is also the case for educational markets. How markets are conceptualised and analysed is very much a function of the disciplinary and ideological paradigms used to understand them. The flexibility of education production, its myriad stakeholders and the divergent utilities of educational outputs make it difficult to arrive at a consensus of its roles, responsibilities and desirable expressions. The normative approach by governments and policymakers is to conceptualise education as a commodity using the discipline of classical economics as an informing paradigm. However, critics of this approach use a Marxist political economy perspective to argue that educational commodities are profoundly complex. Their ‘use values’ must be explored, in addition to the ‘exchange values’ already identified and privileged by a classical economics framework (Marginson, 1997a, pp. 27-36). Accordingly, a broader approach to conceptualise the commodities produced by education markets identifies two commodities: student goods and knowledge goods. Student goods include self goods and training goods, which are purchased by employers to ‘value-add’ to their employees’ skills and potential (Marginson, 1997a, pp. 46-47). Knowledge goods take the forms of tradeable intellectual property (e.g., software, microchips, pharmaceuticals, vaccines, international aid consultancies, etc.). The production of knowledge goods is expected to assume a bigger profile in the knowledge-based economy (pp. 48-49). Self goods11 are probably the most relevant to international students. Included in this category are education credentials and other goods of self-improvement, such as relationships, confidence, particular tastes and sensibilities. In the Singaporean consumer market, self goods and their benefits are captured by the term ‘exposure’ which variously refers to the acquisition of an internationally recognised credential and access to cosmopolitan (westernised) sensibilities. Importantly, self goods constitute positional goods, or the means to social advantage (Marginson, 1997a, p. 38). Securing a place in a prestigious university or a professional school like Medicine constitutes a valued positional good. Using the Singaporean context as an example, credentials from American Ivy League universities, particularly in technoscience disciplines, top the hierarchy of positional goods. In this consumer context, positional goods represent an investment not only for the individual but also other family members12. As I will discuss when I analyse the promotional discourses used by universities to recruit international students, marketing and promotional narratives seek to build a desire for international education around self goods. At the same time, in a bid to embellish the university’s positional status within the highly competitive international education market, promotional narratives 11. Bourdieu

uses the term habitus to capture the multidimensionality of self goods.

12. Funding for overseas studies is often kin-related, with several family members involved in paying for

a student’s education.

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also highlight the types of knowledge goods produced by the international university. The international university’s positional status is effectively ‘airbrushed’ with references to the types of knowledge goods it produces and their net worth. As noted earlier, ideological and disciplinary discourses arrive at different understandings of education’s outputs. A Marxist political economy perspective takes a more complex view of educational goods by embracing education’s use and exchange (market) values. Where exchange values are signified by money, use values are associated with more complex outputs. By way of example, use values can be associated with such outputs as vital social capital for the development of a civil society, intercultural awareness, skills and goodwill, the acquisition of embodied knowledge by individuals and the range of ancillary services provided by educational institutions. Use values are not quantifiable by conventional accounting instruments such as cost-benefit analyses and productivity measurements (Marginson 1997a, pp. 27-28). It is against this backdrop that attempts to quantify the non-pecuniary benefits of international education, for example, the development of intercultural awareness and goodwill, have been deemed ‘too difficult’ (see Baker, McCreedy and Johnson, 1996)13. Another pertinent criticism of the commodity approach to education lies in the ‘spatio-temporal fixities’ of its vision; that is, its inability to conceptualise how educational goods address the needs and concerns of different spatialities and temporalities. I discuss this in detail in Chapter Three when I analyse how space-bound notions of education interact with global forces and processes. Furthermore, a commodity approach to education is criticised for its failure to fully acknowledge ‘public good’ considerations. For the last two decades in Australia, developments in higher education policy have promoted a user-pays philosophy and as such, have taken a largely reductionist view by focusing entirely on exchange values. Accordingly, education has been portrayed as a private good, to be paid for by the individual procurer. Its public good function has largely been ignored. Relatedly and critically, exchange values tend to be anchored in fixed spatio-temporal horizons. They are an expression of what the market values in a given space, and in the present. Thus far, the discussion has been on how markets conceptualise educational goods. The market’s emphasis on education as a fully capitalist commodity, privileges exchange values ahead of use values, while subordinating non-pecuniary outputs, which are largely deemed difficult to quantify. In the Australian context, the production of educational goods within the international education field differs somewhat from its production in the domestic market. International education markets as they currently exist, represent a specific form of capitalist production (Marginson, 1997a, pp. 31-32). Producers (e.g., universities) are generally

13. Baker,

McCreedy and Johnson (1996) attempted to quantify the benefits to Australia of having an international education export industry. They found that international education’s non-pecuniary benefits could not be measured by using a cost-benefit conceptual tool. A counterfactual was required in order to assess what should occur without international students. This proved too difficult as “it required prohibitively large amounts of information [and] many approximations and assumptions”. In an institutional climate where performance, funding and management are increasingly dominated by measurement, ‘objects’ that don’t lend themselves to measurement can find themselves assigned to the category of ‘subordinate’ knowledges.

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motivated to ensure capital accumulation. In many instances, this is undertaken by increasing production at the lowest unit cost, in effect a form of mass production. However, elite universities including those that recruit international students, are less likely to engage in mass-production. They are secure in their status as producers of positional goods and as such are more likely to ‘rationalise’ production and to target a selective customer niche. In doing so, they ensure capital accumulation at the same time as safeguarding their elite status (Marginson, 1997a, pp.45-46). In a system of simple commodity production, profit is not the sole consideration and a series of non-business objectives is also taken into consideration (ibid, p. 31). Initiatives such as the Colombo Plan and the current ‘development cooperation’ programmes which emphasise non-business objectives such as foreign policy considerations, are examples of simple commodity production. To summarise, in this chapter I identified and described two discourses which have shaped international education: a colonial discourse and discourse of markets. Neither of these discursive formations is monolithic, a point that I elaborate in Chapters Four and Five. My intention in mapping this terrain has been to highlight the complex meanings surrounding international education. Each of these meanings points to particular constellations of power and knowledge, each privileges particular politico-economic and cultural formations and each articulates different educational visions and different global imaginaries. The subject positions that arise from these different configurations are similarly complex and variable. In subsequent chapters, I examine the discursive constructions of international education in both producer and consumer sites. I inquire which of the discourses discussed so far, colonial modernity and markets, are privileged in contemporary expressions of international education. Or alternatively, if there is an emergent third discourse, as Scott (1998) suggests, is it a postcolonial and globalizing discourse which is producing new understandings and expressions of international education?

1.4.1

International Student Flows: National and Global Trends

In 1994/1995 1.5 million students worldwide were estimated by the OECD to be undertaking tertiary studies outside their countries of origin. By 2010, it is predicted that some 2.8 million students will be studying abroad14 (Van Damme, 2001, p. 418). In Australia, the growth of international students is widely mooted as a success story. It is associated with economic contributions of $3.7 billion, based on the student fees and the consumption of goods and services15. Figure 1 shows the enrolment of international students in Australian universities at the height of the marketisation phase from 1994 to 200016. As Figure 3 indicates, the growth in numbers has outstripped all expectations. International students in Australian universities 14. Accurate

and current data on the flows of international students is difficult to procure. UNESCO’s Statistical Yearbook provides total numbers of students who are studying in a country other than their own. However, it is not always able to provide up to date information. In the US, the Institute of International Education’s Open Doors publication provides information on international student numbers in the US, while in Australia, DEETYA and IDP are good sources of statistical data. The British Council’s Education Counselling Service is an important source of information on international students in Britain.

15. IDP

Education Australia (2000). Annual General Report.

16. IDP

Education Australia (2002). Fast Facts.

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are concentrated in a few disciplines, with most (49.8%) concentrated in Business administration and Economics (see Figure 2). The biggest exporter of international education is the United States which had 547, 867 ‘foreign students’ studying in American institutions in 2000/2001. This represents earnings of US$11 billion to its national economy17. Figure 4 outlines the regions of origin of international students – 55% come from Asia. After the United States, the largest producer of international education is the United Kingdom. In 1999/2000, the U.K. enrolled 277, 000 international students of which 129, 180 were university students. Earnings from the international education exports and consumption of goods and services by students was estimated then at £ 8 billion.

Figure 1: International Students Enrolled in Australian Universities (1994-2000)

What is significant about these flows is that the producers of higher education are mainly from the industrialised, ‘western’ nations of the world, the ‘North’ while students are overwhelmingly from the ‘South/East’ of developing and newly industrialising nations. First world to first world movement also takes place but at a smaller scale: European Union (EU) students are studying in both the United Kingdom and the United States. By comparison, there are significantly smaller numbers of Americans studying in Europe (Haug, 1996 in Van Damme, 2001, p. 419).

17. From

Open Doors (2001).

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Figure 2: Areas of Study by International Students

Figure 3: International Student Increases (Forecasts)

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Figure 4: Regions of Origin of Foreign Students In the United States

One interpretation of the patterns of student flows is that they are no longer driven by colonial or postcolonial links. Instead, market factors are noted for facilitating discernible shifts in student mobility: flows are no longer about developed countries such as Britain importing students and developing countries in Asia and Africa exporting them...Increasingly universities from developed countries are reaching out to students in developing countries by setting up local campuses, franchising the early years of their degrees to local colleges, devising collaborative programmes with indigenous universities and so on (Scott, 1998, p. 118). This reasoning is based on the argument that whereas in the past colonial historical ties drove demand, it is now economic factors that drive demand. Students are now discerning consumers who choose countries and institutions which offer high quality credentials which will function as positional goods, by yielding maximum returns to their overseas investment. Prospective students are more likely to select as study destinations, those countries which are perceived to be economically dynamic, and which offer credentials that are internationally recognised (see Chen and Barnett, 2000). Furthermore, the volume of economic exchanges between nations is an important factor in shaping student flows. America’s popularity as a study destination in South-East and East Asia, for example, has been attributed to the rapid and significant levels of investment by the U.S. in these regions (see Cummings, 1991; Davis, 1995). This rationale can be usefully applied to Singapore, which as I will discuss in Chapter Six, has committed itself to adopting ‘an American mindset’ in higher education. ‘Market driven’ factors are also held to be responsible for the growing profile of Newly Industrialised Countries (NIC) as consumers, a development attributed to the vastly improved economic circumstances of the middle classes in these settings. In other words, the patterns of consumption are linked to national affluence in consumer sites. Consumption is

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also shaped by the capacity of local producers to meet demand: “domestic national systems have struggled to provide sufficient opportunities in technical, scientific and engineering fields, and in postgraduate education” (Cummings, 1991, pp. 115-117). A close reading of the factors attributed to these consumption trends, reveals a collection of both ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors. The ‘push’ factors portrayed are the reduced national capacity of universities in the ‘sending countries’, while the ‘pull ‘factors include the marketing and promotional activities of universities in producer countries which help to produce desire in an affluent middle class to consume a ‘western’ commodity (Davies, 1997). In the politically neutral language of the market, agency is seen to reside firmly in the ‘sending’ countries and autonomous choosing consumers. There is no distinction drawn between ‘push’and ‘pull’ factors within consumption sites, instead the nuanced influences of political and economic forces at local/national sites are simply constituted as ‘demand’. Yet, a postcolonial analytic would reveal for example, that political, ethnic and racial tensions can be central factors in shaping student flows. The aggressive affirmative action policies of the Indonesian and Malaysian governments which discriminate against ethnic minorities, have been responsible for the flows of significant numbers of students to the three producer countries examined in this study, the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States. Presently, there are nearly 10,000 Malaysian students studying in Australia and 6, 000 Indonesians18. In this case, a ‘push factor’, the cultural politics surrounding national higher education systems in ‘demand’ countries, has been responsible for students’ decisions to choose an overseas education. Other factors noted as influencing student choices of study destinations, are “the absorptive capacities of higher education systems of receiving countries” (Cummings, 1991, p. 118) and the flexibility of admissions policies and immigration regulations (ibid, pp. 117-119). Expressions like these occlude the powerful power politics extant in national settings which aim to select out ‘desirable’ students, while keeping national borders impermeable to less desirable ‘others’ by the use of various technologies of surveillance. In the overwhelming majority of instances, it is identity markers resonant with the ‘first world’ which differentiate the desirable from the undesirable student. National level politics also play a part in defining and setting limits for universities’ ‘absorptive capacities’. Local contingencies such as demand by local students and system-capacity to satisfy this demand, can meld with rising ethnocultural and national particularities, to create political pressures which can culminate in a less welcoming environment for particular categories of international students. I will return to this point in Chapter Four when I analyse the Australian higher education policy. Finally, although the politically neutral language of markets is in use, a power/knowledge analytic unsettles the ‘tranquillity’ of these student flows to reveal a series of extant power relations. Phrases such as ‘receiving country’ to refer to the producer country, together with references to ‘sending countries’ and ‘countries that export their students’ effectively shift the emphasis away from ‘push factors’ in both producer and consumer sites. For example, the reduced state support of 18. These

numbers refer to the onshore students, i.e. those studying in Australia. The statistics are 19, 664 Malaysians and 9720 Indonesians if off shore students are also included (IDP, 2002).

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higher education which has propelled universities in producer countries to sell education to international students to raise revenue; and the reduced domestic capacity in consumer sites which forces individuals to seek an overseas education at significant personal cost. Market language dilutes these complexities in favour of explanations vested in notions of choice and agency. International students (and their families) tend to self-fund their studies although a small proportion are funded by a sponsor, whether a home government or private sector sponsor. The identified customer targeted for attention by universities today is the self-funded individual, whereas two decades ago it was the student supported by country-based aid (Van Damme, 2001, pp. 420-421). Over 80% of all international undergraduates finance their education in the United States from personal and family sources (IIE, 2001). When read as part of an unproblematic panoply of choices, opportunities and desires of individuals which are set against a background of greater accessibility to technology, transport, booming home economies and the disposable income of a burgeoning middle class, the trends and flows of international students become no different from the flows of tourists, business expatriates and cosmopolitan academics. Yet, these conventional orthodoxies can be problematised by mapping the constitutive relations within which these flows are embedded. A power/knowledge theoretical lens is useful here not only to examine the desire for an overseas education in consumer sites, but also to enable analysis of both ‘pull’ and ‘push’ factors as they exist in both producer and consumer contexts. Chen and Barnett’s (2000) study which deployed World System Theory to analyse international student flows, goes part of the way in acknowledging the power/knowledge dimensions in these flows. They argue that a country’s economic and political performance is central in determining whether it is ‘core’ or ‘peripheral’ as a producer of international education. A Foucauldian power/knowledge analytic takes a different approach to that taken by Chen and Barnett in that it provides a conceptual technology with which to identify both macrocontextual and microcontextual forces. For example, it identifies which ‘objects’ of research are privileged and which are subordinated; it also distinguishes between the enunciations of various actors and various institutions. Taking a power/knowledge analytic, some initial questions become immediately obvious. What are the ratios of the reverse flows of students from West/North to East/South, if as Scott claims that market-driven flows have replaced colonial imperatives?19. How do ‘push’ factors shape flows? To what extent are student aspirations to study overseas related to ‘push’ factors within the macro-political contexts of their home countries? More specifically, how are the politics of place and space related to student flows? How do these flows impact on the spatialization of power/knowledge networks? Who are the agents of knowledge within these 19. By

way of example, a more complex engagement with ‘flows’ could involve interrogating student mobility as it relates to a particular academic discipline like Business. A reasonable inquiry could involve investigating the institutional arrangements of American business schools in faciliating student mobility. If Cummings’ analysis which gives primacy to ‘market driven’ factors is accurate, then it could be inferred that American business schools will endeavour to produce graduates with key competencies to enable them to function in major trading markets. We could reasonably inquire about the types of programmes which are in place to facilitate student mobility in exchange programmes and internship placements, the numbers of participants and their experiences.

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networks? Who are the chief beneficiaries? All of these inquiries offer the opportunity to develop more nuanced and complex understandings of international student flows than those offered by supply and demand explanations.

1.5 Purpose of the Research A key question that this thesis addresses is ‘how is international education discursively constructed at this historical moment, a period associated with ‘globalisation’? At the heart of this study then, is the issue of how the power relations that inform and inspire international education, are linked with contemporary processes of globalisation. Here, my aim is to problematize the notion of international education as a trade in education services. Also, rather than conceptualising globalisation as a series of flows, this thesis shifts the focus of the ‘object’ of research to networks (see Held, McGrew, Goldblatt and Perraton, 2000, p. 55)20. It examines international education as a network of markets, producers, consumers, governments, universities, education brokers and students. How is power distributed within these networks, what types of discourses are emerging from each of the nodal points, what types of subjectification processes are in place, and what do they tell us about the power/knowledge regimes within international education markets? My principal aim is to offer some critical observations about how the prevailing power-knowledge constellations that ‘make up’ international education express and respond to the multifarious strands of globalisation. To summarise, the focus of this thesis, is not to visit or to respond to the homogenisation versus differentiation debates which have preoccupied many globalisation theorists. Nor am I interested in establishing if international educational markets are ‘good’ or ‘bad’, that is, whether on the balance, they deliver, more benefits than disadvantages to individual international students. What interests me is the subjectification processes that are produced by international education discourses and their suitability for this historical moment. This study will first describe and analyse the public discourses which construct meanings about international education in the three producer countries: Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, and Singapore, the site of consumption. I take public discourses to be policy, academic and media texts. Public discursive practices simultaneously shape and inform us about the macro-political discursive contexts within which international education operates. They also provide the discursive background from which to situate the micropractices of promotion, which constitutes the primary focus of this study. Second, this thesis will analyse the discursive practices which frame the promotion of international education in six international universities. I investigate how promotional discourses from these institutions construct particular meanings about international education, the international university and the international student.

20. According

to Held and his colleagues, there is indeed a difference between ‘flows’ which they describe as “movements of physical artefacts, people, symbols, tokens and information across space and time”, and ‘networks’ which they argue capture the “interactions between independent agents, nodes of activity, or sites of power “(p. 55).

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To this end, I pose the following questions of international education: • Given the wealth of discursive practices within international education, how have particular assertions assumed prominence? • What were the conditions that shaped the emergence and consolidation of particular discourses about international education and international students? • What are the regimes of truth about the international university and international students in promotional discourses? How do these regimes define subjectivity? • How do the operations of power and knowledge in the international university shape the conditions of possibility for future educational visions?

1.6 Theoretical and Methodological Considerations The intellectual grounding for this study is provided by a poststructuralist analytic, firstly to conceptualise the research questions and secondly, to select the methodological procedures. It takes as a starting position the view that concepts, issues and research problems are not merely descriptive of anything but are themselves, powerfully constitutive. I use two key theories to inform this study. First, I use Foucault’s social theory on discourse to examine how power/knowledge constellations within the international education field establish a repertoire of defining concepts and issues, how they operate particular enunciative modalities21 and how they identify ‘objects’ of knowledge including particular meanings about the international university and the international student respectively. These power/knowledge constellations have the potential to normalise particular subject positions and to shape the development of selective regimes of truth about international education, the international university and the international student. It is by analysing the ‘materiality’ or reproducibility of themes, the emergence and re-emergence of ‘objects’ of discourse including the reappearances of particular subject positions that the power relations within international education markets are revealed. Second, I supplement Foucault’s work with current writings on globalisation, more particularly the frameworks devised by Held and his colleagues (2000) and Appadurai (1996). I use these frameworks to examine how local and global tensions are negotiated by producer and consumer systems within the network of international education markets. In recent times, a proliferation of writings have argued that global processes and forces are facilitating a shift from Western hegemony towards polycentrism (see Pieterse and Parekh, 1995, p. 4). Taking international education, as both an instrument that produces global flows and processes, and an object which is a recipient of global forces and pressures, I inquire if new expressions of international education are emerging, ones no longer premised on Anglo-American ethnocentrism, modernization, third worldism, parochial nativism and anti-westernism (ibid, p. 3).

21. Enunciative modalities can be defined as the rules operating behind the formation and legitimation of

utterances and statements. They concern the status of the speaker, the sites from which statements are made and the position of the subject in discourse (Sheridan, 1980, p. 99).

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A study which impinges on a phenomenon which expresses a ‘North-South’ or ‘East-West’ relationship also requires an investigation of the power relations between geographical spatialities. Following the work of postcolonial theorists, I inquire into the extent to which contemporary expressions of international education have disengaged from their earlier colonizing, imperializing and modernizing imperatives (see Tikly, 1999). Focusing on promotional discourses and using Foucault’s writings on power/knowledge, I re-examine the educational exchanges between producer and consumer countries, and re-work ways of describing and analysing these exchanges which transcend notions of passive transmissions from the ‘centre’ to the ‘periphery’. Underpinning this study then, is a conceptual framework which sees issues of power, knowledge and subjectivity as the key to uncovering the meanings surrounding international education. A poststructuralist framework is used to provide the conceptual framing to analyse what is visible and sayable about international education, international students and the international university. From this level of analysis, it is possible to uncover the conditions of possibilities for alternative ways of thinking about international students and international education. In other words, it enables ways of imagining new educational visions which transcend the spatio-temporal fixities of earlier eras. In order to compare how international education is discursively constructed across different spatial, national and institutional contexts, I use the metaphor of a ‘network’ to frame my research problem. Such an approach is neither new nor novel. It has been widely used by geographers (Latour, 1993; Law and Hetherington, 2000), political scientists (Mann,1986) and sociologists (Castells, 1996, see also Slaughter, 2001b). Rather than focusing on a single national system, for example, the ‘brand’ of international education produced by Australia, or a single institution, a network approach captures the material and discursive forces that shape the meanings surrounding international education. It allows a simultaneous analysis of, for example, state rationalities (‘reason of state’), public discourses, institutional practices and the experiences of individual international students. I discuss the theoretical underpinnings of using the network approach in detail in Chapters Two where I introduce Foucault’s theorisations on power, knowledge, the government of others and the government of the self (governmentality). By using governmentality as an analytic, I have attempted to avoid a key conceptual weakness identified with using a network approach, namely, the tendency to privilege structures at the expense of the agency of individuals and groups of actors. Other approaches have also recognised and remedied this pitfall, for example, Marginson and Rhoades’ (2002) ‘glonacal agency heuristic’. The heuristic emphasises the duality of the term ‘agency’, both as a structure which can exist at local, national or global levels, and the ability of individuals to engage in actions (pp. 288-291). Using governmentality as an analytic in tandem with a network metaphor enables this study to examine the operations of power in multiple sites. It analyses international education as a spatially dispersed collection of markets, policy ensembles, institutions, transactions and social relations, which span local, national and global registers. It offers a framework which moves beyond the binaries of structure versus agency, East versus West, and power as a

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top-down deployment, and allows instead for an analysis of power’s molecular manifestations.

1.7 Methods The ‘data’ collected and analysed for this study is diverse and multitextured and includes written text, image, narrativity, and spatiality. Collectively, it can be described as a network of heterogeneous materialities, the multiple material ‘things’ which define the international university and the international experience of students (see Law and Hetherington, 2000, pp. 35-36; also, Slaughter, 2001a, pp. 407-408). The texts that were analysed for this study included policies, institutional reports and promotional materials such as promotional brochures, newspaper advertisements and internet sites. Kress (1996), Hall (1997a) and Evans and Hall (1999) have been critical in unsettling an orthodoxy which has relegated images to an ancillary position relative to written text. Given this, and given the growing influence of the visual register in communication and representational environments, I have included the analysis of promotional images in this study. Here, my analysis of the visual moves beyond a semiotic approach to uncover the power relations which underpin structures, along with the subjective capacities that shape the abilities of viewers to read, take and produce meaning (see Evans and Hall, 1999, pp. 1-7). Finally, following Lefebvre’s injunctions against prioritizing speech and the written word, I also attempted to engage with ‘spatial texts’ (spatial landscapes) in both production and consumption sites. 22 Data for this study also includes information from semi-structured interviews. I conducted a total of fourteen interviews with key actors within the field of international education: marketing directors from universities and education marketing institutions23, international students, academics and support staff. All were organised using e-mail. In some cases, initial e-mail messages had to be followed up with telephone contact. By navigating institutional websites, I had minimal difficulty in obtaining the contact details of key people, the exception being the two American universities featured in this study. All interviews took place in different national and institutional sites and all were tape recorded and formally transcribed. A few methodological problems were encountered in the course of this study which are worth noting. In some institutions, it proved difficult to locate the department or person who was responsible for marketing. This was especially the case in the two American universities which appeared to function as a loose collection of diverse and autonomous units. Marketing and recruitment of international students was not a centrally administered activity but one more likely to be carried out by Departments and Schools. Consequently, not all the persons spoken to had information about recruitment activities despite their best attempts to acquire the information before my arrival. Although I had intended to transcribe the interviews immediately after, this was not always possible because of the demands of travelling between sites. A time lag of several months thus 22. See 23.

Dear (1997, pp. 50-56) where he discusses Le Febvre’s ontologies and epistemologies of space

The education marketing institutions (brokers) that are targetted in this study include the British Council’s Education Counselling Service and the Australian broker, IDP Education.

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separated some of the interviews from their transcription. Interview transcripts were forwarded back electronically to interviewees but no comments were received, possibly because of the time lag between interviews and the receipt of transcripts. While attempts were made to obtain a ‘diverse’ sample of universities, the final selection was shaped by two factors. First, the need to commence and complete this study within the time frames dictated by my PhD candidature, and second, the access extended by the universities and individual staff within these institutions to me as a researcher. Why these producer countries? In part, this decision was based on my experience as a higher education worker with international students in Australia. I wanted to compare how Australia’s international education programme differed from the more ‘popular’ British and American ‘brands’. Because the field of American higher education is highly differentiated, I selected both a private university (Stanford University), and a public university (State University of New York, Stony Brook) for this study. The Australian universities selected were Monash University, a ‘leader’ in international education within the Australian context, and Queensland University of Technology (QUT), a relatively smaller university which enjoys considerable popularity in Singapore. Both institutions were also selected against a criteria aimed at capturing the diversity of the Australian university context. QUT is a former Institute of Technology. It acquired university status as a result of the Australian government’s policy agenda of amalgamation and rationalisation in the latter part of the 1980s. Monash University, a post-war university has a strong profile as a member of the ‘Group of 8’ research institutions24. In a similar bid to secure diversity, the British universities selected for this study were an ‘old’ university, the London School of Economics (LSE), and a ‘new’ university and former polytechnic, Oxford Brookes University. Finally, some attention was also accorded to the educational brokers, a key subsystem and one growing daily in importance within the field of international education. These include IDP Education Australia, the British Council’s Education Counselling Service (ECS) and the U.S. based, Institute of International Education (IIE). I limited the scope of this study to one consumer site, Singapore. Here, my justification is three fold. First, I selected Singapore in response to calls from globalisation theorists for empirical work to undertake a fine-grained, nuanced examination of local particularities. Second, its city-state status enabled easier access by way of internal travel and access to key people. Third, Singapore’s status as a ‘global city’, as consumer and aspiring producer of international education and as an East-West broker, make it an ideal sites from which to study the localglobal interactions which constitute international education. As Singapore attempts to define its position as a knowledge economy merchant, it provides a extraordinary site from which to analyse how education is being used by nation-states to ‘govern’ globalisation. These factors,

24. Established in 2000, the Group of Eight (Go8) is a coalition of Australia's leading research universities.

It is made up of the following member institutions: The University of Adelaide, The Australian National University, The University of Melbourne, Monash University, The University of New South Wales, The University of Queensland, The University of Sydney and The University of Western Australia.

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combined with my personal history and association with Singapore, sealed my decision to use it as a consumer site. To summarise, I collected and analysed a multi-textured corpus of data, which I deemed to be performative in constructing subjectivities. The strengths of using such an approach lies in its ability to embrace multiple sites, and to use mixed methods and techniques including textual and visual discourse analysis to capture the material and discursive, the nuanced, micro-level and macro-context influences on international education. To this end, it is a method which provides a glimpse of what Foucault terms “the ultimate destination of power” (Foucault, 1980, p. 96).

1.8 Researcher Standpoint Research practices are never neutral but shaped by particular ‘worldviews’. This is well-accepted by researchers writing from poststructuralist and feminist perspectives (Narayan and Harding, 2000; Scheurich, 1997). Accordingly, the generation of the research problem, its subsequent investigation using particular methodologies and its analysis and resolution cannot be a disinterested undertaking. How researchers receive, interpret, appropriate and transmit discourse, is mediated by individual histories, subjectivities and positionings not only of class, gender and ethnicity but also of geographical spatiality. It is on this basis that feminist and poststructuralist researchers are required to acknowledge and make explicit their positioning and politics, their ‘standpoint’. This stated, the situatedness of intellectual work is not universally accepted across the academy where residual and entrenched beliefs in the ‘ideal ‘of objective, value-free social science research remain (Harding, 1987; Lather, 1991). This is compounded by tensions about utilities of the ‘post’ paradigms in intellectual work (e.g., poststructuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism). I will not examine the merits and demerits of these debates–the “paradigm wars”–aside from stating that this study has used insights from both the structuralist/modernist and poststructuralist/postmodernist paradigms. Following Morley (1996), I have attempted to reconcile the use of what are deemed ‘opposing’ models of doing research by viewing the ‘posts’ not in temporal terms but in spatial terms. Accordingly, the postmodern co-exists with the modern in the same way that poststructuralism coexists with structuralism (see also Massey, 1999; Morley, 1996 and Slaughter, 2001a). Coming from this position, I utilise theoretical insights from both structuralism and poststructuralism to analyse international education networks. In part, this theoretical position is anchored in my personal history of spending my childhood in a region (South-East Asia), at a particular historical juncture when the ideologies of capitalism, communism, and imperialism25 collided with each other, while at the same time pushing and pulling against the impulses of modernization and religious sectarianism. Sometimes these collisions yielded peaceful and productive synergies; at other times they produced and sustained profoundly 25. Imperialism

is the political and economic domination of one or several countries by another power. For Lenin imperialism was an inherent feature of economic development in advanced capitalist countries. Some theorists have argued that imperialism ended with political independence from colonial rule, while others argue that indirect control has increased with the end of colonial rule through economic domination (Jary and Jary, 1995, p. 309).

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destructive and dysfunctional synergies. With this in mind, I offer a brief autobiographical sketch to outline my standpoint on transnational and transcultural exchanges and the politics of power underwriting these exchanges. I was born in Singapore into a family whose members had originally travelled from India to Malaya and Singapore at the turn of the 20th century. They were part of the turbulent and disruptive global movement of people looking to escape war, internal displacement and poverty. For at least 100 years before my birth, my family had worked for the colonial authorities. My maternal great grandfather, Ritdaman Singh had been a surveyor employed by the British to work in the North-West Frontier Province, in Pakistan during their attempts to expand their colonization efforts into Afghanistan in the nineteenth century. On my father’s side, they were the Empire’s soldiers and policemen. They settled in Malaya. All the men in our family, extending back to my maternal great grandfather in the mid-19th century, spoke English fluently. Neither of my grandmothers, however, spoke any English. Their daily lives were mainly spent in the private domain of the family home and were largely untouched by things colonial. Their involvement with white people for the 30 or so years of their lives when Singapore and Malaysia were colonies, was limited to occasional sightings from a distance, although this was no deterrent to their acquisition of an understanding and imagination of the colonial era. They spoke of a pre-war era of apartheid where urban spaces were racialized and entire areas were out-of bounds to persons of colour; of the Japanese Occupation and the two months it took for ‘Fortress Singapore’ and Malaya to fall to the bicycle-borne Japanese Imperial Army. The Occupation had a politicising effect on many colonial and dominion ‘subjects’ like my family. It showed them that white people were not invincible. The special privileges that white people had enjoyed before the war were no longer acceptable to them when the British returned to Singapore and Malaya after the Occupation. The complex and contradictory politics of transcultural borrowings and identity building surrounding the political independence of the colonies, were played out in our family home. Decisions as to what language we children should speak at home, how we should dress, how much we should know of our religion, how many people of our ‘race’ we should mix with – this was the arena of struggle between my parents. My father won. An officer in the Malayan Army, he had been trained by the British and Australian armed forces. He insisted that we speak English at home although this was not his first language. My mother, who was only 19 when her marriage was arranged to my father, had completed a college education in India, spoke fluent Punjabi and Hindi, and had a very good knowledge of Indian philosophy, music and history but was discouraged from speaking to her children in her first language. My father was extraordinarily disparaging of Indian people from India. He referred to them frequently as ‘the Babu’ and regarded them to be smooth-talking and dishonest. It was only much later that I discovered the origins of this word,’Babu’ while reading postcolonial literature. Associated with the ‘Bengali Babu’, it was a term used to refer to Bengali intellectuals, possibly one of the most vociferous group within the Indian anti-colonial movement. We grew up knowing little about our traditions and language, which made it difficult to cement close relationships with our grandmothers and our extended family in India. My father was also full of contradictions. He remained turbaned and bearded, like most practising Sikhs. His appearance marked him out significantly as ‘the other’. He would not allow us to anglicize our names. He did not support cross cultural marriages in the family. He took to manufacturing a repertoire 24

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of ‘stories’ to warn us against transgressing ethnocultural and religious boundaries. An excessive mimicry of things ‘western’ was frowned upon and ridiculed. Yet at the same time, we were encouraged to have friends from every religious and ethnocultural group. My parents’ close and intimate friends were similarly drawn from different communities. As children, we moved in and out of each other’s homes, enjoying an easy intimacy around shared meals and sleep-overs. In short, selective dimensions of intercultural borrowings were acceptable. An overseas credential was fine as was the ability to speak fluent English. It was all about having the right balance of East and West, although no one ever made it clear what the formula was. They probably did not know themselves. Every engagement has a productive dimension and all that English speaking eventually ‘paid off’, especially once we emigrated to Australia. We children were able to adjust to schooling with less difficulty than my Hong Kong friends, for example. It was a trade-off that many children of my generation accepted with few questions. You mechanically took on the ‘identity’ that would give you the best chance for the future. The best chance meant having a first world passport as it would enable you to live somewhere relatively safe. As children, my parents had experienced the privations of the Second World War, followed later on by decolonization and the bloody ideological battles between capitalism and communism. They had lived through and experienced at first hand the turbulence and tensions arising from the collisions of awesome ideologies: the Malayan Emergency, bloody ‘race’ riots, curfews and religious and ethnic communalisms. It was not surprising then, that they wanted to protect us from what they had experienced. Get an education and acquire enough wealth to insulate yourself from danger, poverty and racism. In looking back, a few things stand out. One was a real drive and desire by the people around me, family, friends, neighbours, to get an English speaking education. When I was seven years old, I started school in Malaysia, not Singapore where I was born. It was the year when the indigenization policy was first introduced into schools. English as a medium of instruction was replaced with Bahasa Malaysia. We were not happy with this postcolonial statement. Bahasa Malaysia had no currency in the international world, and it meant little to the immigrant diaspora. In the Malaysian context of the 1970s, indigenization was perceived to have a covert goal, it reflected a political agenda aimed at shifting the balance of power in favour of the dominant group, the Malays (bumiputera). My other childhood memory is of considerable social pressure to have better material things. There were so many ‘must-haves’, and it became increasingly difficult for my parents to keep up with our material aspirations. We were bombarded with consumer goods from the West: Tupperware, Corningware, Levis jeans, imported cars, Coca Cola, the Joanne Drew Slimming clinics. We were bombarded by them but we also desired them because they marked us as having status. Our media entertainment was dominated by American TV programming, a steady stream of movies about Cowboys and Indians; Charlie’s Angels, Starsky and Hutch, and an endless list of B-grade Hollywood movies. We were less exposed to the Bollywood movie culture from India, due to my father’s biases. He was similarly disparaging of local programming such Malay romantic dramas and Indonesian horror movies. In the public space, there was little in the way of multiple comments, opinions, discourses about balancing ‘western’ imports with indigenous cultural products. Equally, there was a paucity of spaces in which to talk about democratic politics. Lots of things were termed ‘sensitive’ a euphemism for anything deemed politically contentious. We could not talk about things like communism in schools aside from acknowledging it was ‘bad’. We could not talk about religion. These injunctions was also

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present in the foreign media accessible to us. There was no space outside the private sanctum of family life to discuss difficult issues. Even then, my father’s family background as one of the Empire’s soldiers meant more tensions and confusions than resolutions to these dilemmas. Once a month, we received a glossy magazine from the United States Information Service (USIS). It featured all sorts of ‘glamorous’ stories – the tragic Kennedy clan, Christmas in Iowa, potato farmers in Idaho, the Nixons’ trip to China and so on. Looking back, I don’t recall any stories on the anti-war movements or American military atrocities in Indochina. Along with publications like the Readers Digest, which was one of the cheapest and most accessible ‘foreign’ magazines around, we gained a snapshot of the western world and its values. We imported new forms of ‘othering’. Hippies, for example, were reviled, noted for their drug experimentations and regarded as prone to drug-related psychoses and crime. The irrational fear and dislike for hippies and what they represented was manifested in big and small ways. The Singaporean government would not allow males with long hair into the country. These simplicities, crude, even laughable, were also highly effective. Local men who insisted on keeping their hair long were considered to have criminal persuasions, and were more likely to be arrested by the police. One image that intrudes into my memory is of official posters in government departments declaring that ‘men with hair-length below their collar will be served last’. In this Manichean moral environment, things were uniformly portrayed as either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The lived effects of these discourses meant that it was tremendously difficult to know how to resist in ways that did not endanger oneself or one’s family. It was also difficult to know what to resist. Everything had been constructed in binary terms, even civil action to resist the petty micropratices of officialdom could just as easily result in one being labelled ‘subversive’. Student activism in both Malaysia and Singapore continued to be carefully controlled up to the end of the 1970s. Aspiring university students were routinely screened by the ‘CID’ (Central Intelligence Department) to ensure that they were of ‘good character’ before being allocated university places. Every aspiring student and every parent knew this. Although this and other such practices of surveillance have now been discontinued, it is impossible to ‘measure’ the extent to which their discursive logics remain inscribed in people’s imaginations including mine. Just two years ago while attending a conference on globalisation at the elite and ‘world class’ National University of Singapore, I stood in a departmental foyer reading a set of regulations which specifies the dress codes of the university’s students and lists sanctions for breaking these rules. It was a reminder to me that much remains the same, that freedoms are acceptable only within state-defined parameters. Things are similar in my other home, Malaysia, the state continues to monitor and regulate universities’ activities including that of individual academics who face dismissal if they are perceived to be critical of the government26. There is a practiced ease with which the state violates its people’s rights. I have lived this reality and it has made me and many of my contemporaries wary of crossing certain boundaries. My history, context and location have been integral to how I have approached this study, from formulating the ‘problem’ to be investigated, to the selection of theoretical and methodological frameworks. I have approached globalisation and international education as a set of intensely political processes. ‘Becoming global’ holds out risks and rewards to individuals and these are not entirely disconnected from historical and structural aprioris. I

26. The

dismissal of Professor Chandra Muzzafar of the University of Malaya in 1999 is a case to point.

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show in this study that compressing cultural and physical distances to develop ‘global closeness’ is both complex and resource-intensive, particularly for students who receive few signposts from educators. I argue that the power/knowledge relations which are produced and disseminated by instrumentalities such as universities continue to reinforce territorially fixed notions of identity and social relations. Outside of the arena of consumption, the barriers to assuming a supraterritorial subjectivity are significant. To illustrate some of the challenges associated with ‘compressing’ space and crossing boundaries, I include details of my fieldwork journeys. Finally, to capture the diversity, unevenness and heterogeneity of international education networks, I have titled the data analysis chapters, ‘Worlds of Production’. They reflect the multiple worlds spanned by international education networks – a world of markets and money, of intellectual resources, interpersonal relations, of signs and of symbols. So far in this chapter, I have outlined the origins of international education exchanges, and traced its trajectories from a beginning influenced by modernization, colonialism and the political manoeuvring of Cold War politics. Some of the themes that I have introduced in this chapter, notably, the power/knowledge constellations surrounding international education, will be re-visited in detail in subsequent chapters when I explore the relations between discourses of international education, globalisation and modes of subjectification. To conclude this chapter, I map out the structure of this thesis.

1.9 Thesis Overview In Chapter One, I introduced the focus of this research and discussed my history and the standpoint I bring to this research. In Chapter Two, I describe the theoretical and methodological tools used in this study. These include Foucault’s social theory on discourse, power and subjectivity. I also introduce the analytic tools of governmentality and archaeology which I use to analyse the discursive practices that make up international education. Chapter Three will review the globalisation literature and examine the theoretical possibilities and limitations that globalising forces, pose for international education and the international university. Chapters Four and Five describe and analyse the discursive practices which shape international education at the ‘supply’ or producer end. Chapter Four focuses on Australia as a production site of international education, while Chapter Five describes international education in the British and American contexts. In both chapters, I examine the public discursive practices which operate within the ‘macro-contextual’ terrain to produce particular understandings of the international university and international students, namely, higher education policy, academic discourse and media texts. In Chapter Six, I shift the research gaze to a ‘demand’ node, that of the consumer market– Singapore. Here, I show how the discursive practices underpinning education in general and international education in particular, are shaped by interactions between historical, economic, cultural and social contingencies. I offer a historical and sociopolitical profile of Singapore, its transition from colonial to postcolonial nation-state and its developmental trajectory from Fordist to postFordist state. I analyse how these contingencies have affected not only the

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‘mentalities, arts and regimes’ of government of the nation but also government of the self. Chapters Four, Five and Six thus, seek to establish the basis for understanding the interrelationships between international education and globalisation via the education-economy prism. In Chapter Seven, I use the analytic tools of archaeology and governmentality to analyse promotional discourses used by Australian institutions to market international education. I examine how the international university is being constructed by these promotional discourses, and the subject positions that they create for international students. The focus of this chapter is on two Australian universities (QUT and Monash University) and IDP Education Australia, an education broker. Chapter Seven thus, attempts to offer a multitextured analysis of international education by including analyses of promotional texts, visual images and both student and staff narratives. Chapter Eight does the same, through its analysis of British institutions–the London School of Economics, Oxford Brookes University and the British Council’s Education Counselling Service (ECS). Chapter Nine examines the promotional discourses that are produced by two international American universities: Stanford University and the State University of New York (Stony Brook). I also examine the discourses of the Institute of International Education (IIE), an educational broker. In Chapter Ten, I summarise the research findings. I discuss how existing power/knowledge constructions shape the construction of the international university and the appropriateness of these constructions for an interdependent, ‘global’ world. In the next chapter, I will explain my use of Foucault’s social theory. My discussion of Foucault’s theorisations in Chapter Two will establish the basis for a critical review of the literature on globalisation and educational markets in Chapters Three and Four. It will also provide the theoretical tools with which to analyse promotional micropractices, which represent the primary focus of this thesis.

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