At the heart of student migration education, mobility, and the time space production of everyday life

1.1

A Provocation for Research
Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object
not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter…
(Deleuze, 1968: 139)
Year 2010. I made a new friend, and I identify him as Andy (a pseudonym)… I

met Andy at a friend’s gathering. He was at a corner all by himself, fiddling with his
mobile phone. I teased my friend for being a ‘poor’ host and guided his attention to
Andy. My friend knew that I had prior research experiences with SingaporeanVietnamese international marriages and ‘shoved’ me towards Andy, “He’s
Vietnamese. Help me entertain him please!”
Encountering a Student Migrant… Andy was a 21 year-old Vietnamese who
came to Singapore in 2007 to study at a private university. He told me that he was
finishing up his study and had to return to Vietnam, yet he was unhappy about it. I
recall his explanation to be a complex mixture of pragmatic and emotional logics. He
felt that he would earn more money and lead a better life here in Singapore. In
addition, he had forged new friendships in Singapore that he could not bear to part
with. Andy likened this to, in his words as I remember, having to “start all over
again” and re-adapt himself to the lifestyle and environment of Vietnam. But at the
same time, he also looked forward to seeing his family and friends back in Ho Chi
Minh City.
A week before Andy’s departure… I had exchanged Facebook contact with
Andy in order to stay in touch with him and later discovered that we lived in the same
precinct. A week before Andy was due to leave Singapore, he asked me out for
coffee. Andy was feeling ambivalent about returning home. When I asked him what
his plans were, he told me that he would not discount the possibility of coming back
to Singapore for postgraduate study or work in a few years’ time. In fact, he appeared

1

steadfast in his belief that he would return to Singapore soon. Andy asked me the
same question. I explained to him that I would begin my graduate study by research
in August 2010…

1.2

Stories of Student Migration from Singapore
The encounter with Andy has provoked me to wonder about the intimate

worlds of international students who leave their homes to study in Singapore. Andy’s
narrative opened up a series of questions surrounding the logics of their migratory
journeys, youthful aspirations, and the social connections they maintain and forge in
host communities. At the Heart of Student Migration builds on this one encounter. It
is about young Southeast Asian overseas students at the heart of the everyday,
quotidian, and transnational geographies of education migration. By mobilizing a
range of critical perspectives on young people, education, and migration, I assemble
stories about these student migrants’ class-travelling aspirations, changing positions
and identifications with the self and others, as well as the variegated forms of social
ties that connect them to people and places afar. Central to this thesis is a concern
with the everyday processes and practices involved in socially reproducing young
people’s cross-border lives. At the same time, social reproduction is taken to be a
complex iterative process that operates through both spatial and temporal
organization.
As Kell and Vogl (2010) observed, global student mobility has gained
significance in the wake of contemporary cross-border flows and globalization.
Previous studies on the geographies of student mobility have often placed emphasis
on student migration from the ‘East’ to the ‘West’. Yet, the global mobility of
students in the last decade has become more multi-directional and disturbs the

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simplistic classification of an East-West trajectory of student migration. Indeed, East
Asian cities such as Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore are actively
promoting themselves as ‘education hubs’. This research focuses on the intra-regional
stories of international student migration by attending to the voices of Southeast
Asian students who pursue higher education in Singapore. In recent years, we have
witnessed a change in how Singapore’s education landscape is increasingly made up
of a more diverse student population. As revealed by Prime Minister Lee Hsien
Loong (2011) in the National Day Rally address, international students account for
18% of the student body in local universities. This significant proportion of
international students is perceived to be paramount to building Singapore’s reputation
as a world-class education hub on the one hand, and as a vehicle in fueling the citystate’s knowledge economy.
At the same time, the growing number of international students in Singapore
is also sparking debates over whether Singaporean young people are pushed out-ofplace in the face of competition from foreigners. This has led to resentment over the
perceived preferential treatment towards ‘foreigners’. In order to appease the ‘nation’,
and as part of the calibrated and measured style of immigration policy characteristic
of post-independence Singapore government, the Minister of Education announced
that a ‘cap’ has been put in place to bring down the proportion of foreign students
from 18% to about 15%. In order to achieve the ‘cap’, universities will expand their
intake by 2,000 more places for Singaporean students while retaining the present
level of international students. This Singapore-style strategy to regulate student
migration reflects the persisting conviction that the city-state is to be augmented by a
constant supply of talented young people to meet the expanding knowledge economy.
Yet, the view that international students occupy an important role in fueling the

3

economic growth is symptomatic of an economic pragmatism that tends to portray
students as ‘objects of education’. This parallels Brooks and Waters’ (2011: 131)
observation that:

More generally, in many ways the voices of international students have
been silenced within contemporary debates… This is, potentially, one
consequence of the tendency to perceive international students as ‘cash
cows’ – the quality of their social and pedagogical experiences comes
second to and far below the need to attract international students.
In my research on Southeast Asian overseas students in Singapore, I emphasize the
need to focus on their everyday social relations and negotiations, and more
importantly, the recognition that these youths are embodied agents who construct
their own educational and migratory geographies. As a starting point, this study views
international students as individuals who have certain dispositions and lifestyles that
are simultaneously affiliated to the categories of ‘student’, ‘young people’, and
‘migrant’. As Holloway et al. (2010: 594) point out, attending to "the voices and
subjectivities of young people" as constituted through diverse connections with
families, friends, and the larger communities not only has the potential to advance
existing knowledges surrounding the social and cultural geographies of education, but
also forces us to write stories about the nexus between globalization and education
that eschews an adultist perspective.

1.3

Research Objectives
At the broadest level, this thesis aims to kick-start a critical project to think

‘time' alongside ‘space' in examining the complexities of cross-border mobilities.
While the transnational perspective has arguably provided a corrective to the view
that ‘space' is circumscribed to a bounded locality, ‘time' has been less of an explicit

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concern within migration studies. This research focuses on two interrelated objectives
in studying the geographies of student migration. First, I examine how spatiotemporalities shape the ways in which student migrants articulate their experiences of
mobility. Second, I unpack how these student migrants perceive and organize
intimate relationships through their imagined and lived experiences of time and
space. These will be explored through the following cross-cutting questions:

1. What are the motivations for these students to further education in Singapore, and
what are the aspirations emerging from their experiences of mobility?

2. What are the meanings, practices, and technologies involved in the production and
maintenance of different social relationships in the cross-border context?

3. How do ‘time’ and ‘space’ configure and organize these personal experiences,
social relations, and practices that constitute the everyday life of student migration?

1.4

Thesis Map
This chapter has outlined a broad overview of the research impetus, direction

and objectives of this study. Chapter 2 provides a critical evaluation of selected
literature on international education, young people’s experiences of education and
mobility, and transnational migration studies. The theoretical abstractions identified
here will form the basis for the conceptual framing adopted in the thesis. In Chapter
3, I will focus on the rationale for Singapore to internationalize its education spaces
and the strategies to attract Southeast Asian overseas students. Chapter 4 goes on to

map out the methodological route and reflects on the methods and ethical issues

5


involved in the study. The empirical materials will be analyzed in two sections. In
Chapter 5, I frame student migrants’ experiences within globalizing spaces of
education through the lens of ‘transition’ to discuss their stories of ‘going away’,
moving with/against time, and orientations toward the future. Chapter 6 attends to
the intimate accounts of how different meanings and transnational practices are
negotiated in shaping their proximate and distant lives with others. I will then
conclude in Chapter 7 by critically reflecting on what a spatio-temporal perspective
has brought to bear on the geographies of student migration.

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2.1

Introduction
This chapter evaluates selected bodies of literature to draw out theoretical

intersections that will orientate a critical analysis of young student migrants’
experiences in Singapore. These overlapping strands of work include contributions of
scholars who are interested in international education; sociologists, anthropologists,
and geographers who study young people’s everyday experiences; and migration
scholarship that adopts a transnational perspective to examine cross-border lives.
While the scope of review is wide, an engagement with a broader set of literature can
help de-center certain assumptions made by existing studies of student migration.
This, I argue, is useful for constructing a more grounded, intimate, and accountable

rendering of the globalizing spaces of education. I begin by raising the phenomenon
of student migration as an instance of the globalizing spaces of education. This will
be discussed in Section 2.2 where I posit international students as inhabitants of
transnational spaces, therefore revealing a more expansive range of relationships,
interactions, and practices that constitute their experiences of mobility. I also argue
that in order to gain a better understanding of the intimate grounds that student
migrants navigate, there is a need to accord more weight to the ‘voices’ of these
young people in telling stories of their migratory and educational journeys.
In Section 2.3, I discuss three critical junctures in the review of existing
literature about young people, education, and migration. The theoretical abstractions
are organized into three ways of thinking about young people’s experiences in
international education spaces – the intersection between lifecourse and migration;
the ‘scholarization’ of student lives; and the role of networks and intimate ties that
underpin transnational geographies. The central concern is to do with the social
(re)production of everyday social relations, practices, and affects, and the ways in

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which a variety of spaces and times participate in the making, routinizing, and/or
disrupting of these elements. Building on the perspective of ‘space’ and ‘place’ in
examining the geographies of student migration, I propose a critical time-space lens
to further explicate the complex social ordering of social relations and practices in
these geographies. Section 2.4 tries to make clear the role of time/temporality (and
space/spatiality) in the making of everyday life by presenting three registers at which
the cartographies of time can be unfolded. In doing so, I develop a framework that
takes ‘space’ and ‘time’ as multiply experienced, practiced, and materialized to
analyze the temporal horizons, powers, and textures that co-produce specific spatial
continuities and discontinuities in student migrants’ lives.

2.2

Globalizing Spaces of Education: a Case of Student Migration
In the face of globalization, education as an enterprise has become highly

competitive as a key site in the production of knowledge economies. This is
especially clear in the case of higher education landscape, where tertiary education is
said to be central to the economic well-being of many societies through its
contribution to shaping a skilled workforce and sharpening key competencies such as
creativity, critical thinking, and capacity for learning. As such, governments and
institutions are eager to capture globalization’s advantages by developing strategies to
internationalize education. Indeed, many of the works in this area have pointed out
that in order to remain competitive on the global stage, universities have to plug
themselves into the wider assemblage of knowledge spaces and develop strategies to
attract and retain expertise that are constantly circulating within these networks
(Altbach, 2003; Hoyler and Jöns, 2008; Jöns, 2009; Olds, 2007). For example within
the Asia-Pacific context, quality assurance and accreditation of international

8


education is becoming a pressing issue for education providers and consumers in the
region (Knight, 2010), and this can become a major factor in influencing students’
choices of places to further education. Other studies have begun to trace the impacts
of transnational education markets on both sending and hosting countries, institutions,
and practices (Macaranas, 2010; Hall, 2008).
Against the background, and acknowledgement, of the political-economic
impacts of the internationalization of education and its potential for stimulating
economic growth (Postiglione, 1997; Kemal, 2008), this section sets an agenda for a
more critical attention on student migrants as one of the key actors in the globalizing

spaces of education.

2.2.1 From ‘International’ to ‘Transnational' Student Migration
As Findlay and Tierney (2010) note, international student mobility is
becoming ever more significant in the past few decades as the number of people who
migrate for education within and across regions continues to increase. While policy
planners are often interested in the large-scale trends of such flows, it is also
important to acknowledge that the complexities of these migrations cannot be fully
grasped by referencing to global trends, demographic patterns and country statistics.
In light of this, an existing body of scholarly work has focused on the experiences of
international students, with especial attention to cross-cultural issues within host
societies and institutions. These studies show that international students’ experiences
of living and studying in new environments are deeply intertwined with their
nationality, ethnicity, class, gender, and the languages they speak (see Andrade and
Evans, 2009; Gordon et al., 2000; Kell and Vogl, 2008; Montgomery and McDowell,
2008). However some scholars, notably geographers who research on students as

9


transnational migrants, have argued that the experiences of international students are
also embedded in broader sets of connections that span across both sending and host
communities (Waters, 2005; 2006).
Here, it is instructive to underscore the epistemological shift in how migration
processes have been conceptualized by both migration scholars and geographers.
Rather than bracketing international student mobility into a linear process, a
transnational perspective argues that migration trajectories are diffused into multiple
circuits of movement facilitated by a globalizing capitalist system (Basch et al., 1994)
and grounded by multi-stranded networks that connect communities across nationstates (Hannerz, 1996; Portes et al., 1999; Levitt, 2001; Vertovec, 2001). These
attachments and ties that straddle between the ‘here and there’ also involve a host of

emotions and affects that in turn define and shape mobile experiences (Velayutham
and Wise, 2005; 2006). Geographers in particular have shown how examining such
relations can challenge the grand narratives of transnational mobilities. These
counter-narratives, which often emerge from migrants’ everyday spaces (Ley, 2004),
include those that challenge the masculinist assumptions embedded within
transnational topographies (Pratt and Yeoh, 2003), the excessive accordance of
‘footloosed-ness’ to mobile trans-migrants (Mitchell, 1997), and the revelation of
multiple actors and networks involved in constructing transnational experiences that
might not necessarily entail physical movements but cultural transfers (Crang et al.,
2003).
In the field of student migration, it has been documented that transnational
connections are important resources for both young people and their families to
advance their socio-economic positions through overseas education (Cairns and
Smith, 2011; Waters, 2005; 2006). At the same time, international students also shape

10


the urban landscapes of host destinations through both their bodily presence and the
cultural and material modifications enabled by their transnational connections
(Collins, 2008; Fincher and Shaw, 2006). These works not only stress the importance
of observing everyday mobilities, practices and connectivities (Conradson and
Latham, 2005a), but also point towards according greater attention to transnational
spatialities as “the diverse ongoing connections and networks that bind different parts
of the world together and that are constituted through (and in fact constitute)
particular sites and places” (Featherstone et al., 2007: 383-384).
In another words, socio-spatial relations are integral to the shaping of crossborder experiences. As international education scholar Gargano (2009: 337) argues, a
critical examination of international student mobility demands a more complex
“conceptual space for addressing evolving familial, academic, and social networks
across borders”. For her, the concept of ‘social fields’ opens up a space to investigate

the ways in which student identities and subjectivities are shifting vis-à-vis changing
relations with families abroad, educational experiences, and other ties forge at both
the local and cross-border contexts. However, I argue that this concept may not
sufficiently articulate the geographical specificities and role of place in anchoring
transnational processes, practices, and affiliations. For example, Collins (2008: 166)
has shown that Korean students in Auckland find it “possible to at least temporarily
reground everyday lives that have been uprooted in the processes of migration”
through eating out in places that create an intimate sense of proximity to ‘home’ and
feelings of familiarity.
In order to more fully understand the practices, meanings, and feelings that
emerge from student migrants’ inhabitance of space and place, I suggest that the
conceptual lens of transnationalism be critically inflected through the perspective that

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student migrants inhabit the grounds of both material and social spaces through their
bodies. Adopting this perspective could also means that we need to take the ‘voices’
and practices of student migrants as the starting point to think about their migratory
experiences, and question how these ‘voices’ and practices are connected to the
production and politicization of everyday socio-spatial relations.

2.2.2 A ‘Student-Centered’ Perspective: Stories through the ‘Body’
In his paper on the geographies of studentification, Hubbard (2008) points out
the importance of situating students at the center of geographical studies on the
continuing expansion of education spaces. Put it simply, there is a concern with what
matters for these young people. Viewed from a ‘student-centered’ approach, the role
of student migrants becomes more salient and meaningful in the production and
reproduction of everyday lives within the transnational spaces of education. This
entails a shift away from the market-oriented approach towards a more humanizing

account of the bodies that navigate across borders, including what the bodies are
capable of doing – their practices, feelings, imaginations, and all other modes of
engagement with the worlds they live in. For instance, studies have shown that apart
from family and education, friendship and romance also have crucial bearing on how
international students negotiate emotional well-being (Wang and Mallinckrodt, 2006;
Hendrickson et al., 2010). This calls to attention the importance of understanding
student lives through a more expansive lens – one that takes into consideration the
diverse thick and thin social relations and subjectivities that are tied to the less
palpable sites of their intimate lives, or what Walsh (2009) calls the ‘heart of
transnational spaces’.
In examining cross-border geographies of embodied relations, the concept of

12


‘embodied transnationalism’ (Dunn, 2010) has been adopted by several scholars to
consider how transnational lives are spatialized according to the bodily movements,
practices, imaginations, and a whole range of affective styles resulting from a
combination of these ‘body-works’. In a similar vein, Ho and Hatfield (2011) argue
that understanding the intimate and quotidian life-worlds of migrants require scholars
to examine the seemingly insignificant norms, routines and everyday experiences.
Collectively, this set of scholarly literature gathers insights from a range of theories
on the embodied, the emotional, and the non-representational to draw attention to the
sociality and materiality of everyday life. These include social relations and
interactions, as well as the material cultures that constitute the social and cultural
worlds that trans-migrants inhabit. Here, the body is seen as a central site in which the
styles of gender, race, nationality, sexuality and other differences are enacted, but at
the same time also capable of disrupting these routinized performances. In this sense,
there is a politics to the production and reproduction of bodies that are tied to the
socio-spatialities of migration events and processes.

Building on the theoretical contributions by feminist scholars surrounding the
politics of embodiment, Dunn (2010) made several important points about embodied
transnational topographies – bodies are disciplined and regulated in migration
regimes; they are unevenly empowered through embodied and institutional politics;
they bear emotional and affective ties within and across spaces; and bodies are
differently emplaced and made mobile across transnational spaces. In writing about
the concept of embodiment in the context of mobilities, Gorman-Murray (2009: 444)
has also argued if we accept that migrants are not disembodied actors, then “sensual
corporeality, intimate relationality and other facets of emotional embodiment” can be
said to have profound implications on migratory mobilities, trajectories and practices.

13


In this sense, it is the complex interweaving of such elements of the ‘everyday’ –
feelings, practices, interactions, materialities – that form the texture of our intimate
experiences with the world, which at the same time cannot be divorced from their
more ‘global’ and transnational exchanges, flows and rhythms.
In bringing the above theoretical perspectives to bear on researching the
globalization of education spaces, the project of constructing knowledges based on
narratives and observations about student migrants’ everyday lives is not so much of
an indulgent practice, but seen as a critical strategy to produce alternative scripts of
contemporary globalization processes. In Mountz and Hyndman’s (2006: 458) words,
in order “to question disembodied knowledge production”, there is a need to
consciously “propose embodied epistemologies that create more accountable
renderings of globalization”. The authors also reminded that embodied social
relations, while deeply grounded in the everyday and experienced through the ‘body’,
are subtly connected to the intimate stories emerging, and often in a simultaneous
fashion, from other places and times. Hence, a ‘student-centered’ perspective points
towards foregrounding, amongst others, at least two theoretical orientations that will

underpin the rest of this thesis. First, the attendance to student voices through
individual biographies means a heightened sensitivity to the (re)production of
identities, feelings, and practices in the spaces they inhabit. Second, although these
elements of their everyday lives emerge through the ongoing interactions occurring
within present space-time, they are constituted through the stretching of sociospatialities that connect to a variety of places, sites and scales.

2.3

Critical Perspectives on Young People, Education, and Migration
In the previous section, a critical agenda has been contoured around the study

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of globalizing education spaces to argue that we need to shift out attention away from
‘globalist’ narratives towards a more ‘grounded’ and ‘embodied’ approach. This
research specifically focuses on student migrants as important ‘bodies’ hitherto less
examined in existing literature on geographies of education. In order to further
Gargano’s (2009: 337) proposal to “better understand how educational sojourners
position themselves within academic and international student communities, make
sense of their networks of associations, and envision possibilities”, it is useful to
consider a broader range of scholarly perspectives that have sought to examine the
different geographies that student migrants navigate. It is important to point out that
in discussing a broader range of scholarly works, I am not aiming to provide an
exhaustive précis. Rather, the literature presented in the following is an outcome of
abstracting what I consider to be critical junctures in the relatively disparate sets of
literature. These abstractions will then lay the foundation to frame the conceptual
approach adopted in this study, as well as be put into their material contexts to reflect
on the ‘voices’ of student migrants (see Chapter 5 & 6).
In this section, I draw on scholarly works produced by geographers, and to a

lesser extent anthropologists and sociologists, to discuss three sets of critical
perspectives that will nuance our understanding of the lives of educational sojourners.
Towards the end, I connect these strands of perspectives through the intellectual lens
of social reproduction, and argue that student migration is at once a response to the
globalizing spaces of education as well as an arena for the making, maintenance, and
resistance towards the routinizing effects of these forces.

2.3.1 Lifecourse, Mobility, and Migration
In Findlay et al.’s (2006) study of student mobility as a process that links life-

15


stages of schooling, university life and entrance into the labour market, the authors
argue that there is a need to situate knowledges of mobility not only geographically
but also in relation to different life-course trajectories. According to Bailey (2009:
407), the lifecourse approach “seeks to describe the structures and sequences of
events and transitions through an individual’s life”. Indeed life-stages, events, and
other significant moments have long been acknowledged to be part of migration
motivations and trajectories (Mortimer and Shanahan, 2004). For instance, King and
Ruiz-Gelices (2003) have shown that international students concoct strategies across
education, career and even residency or citizenship statuses to improve their present
and future situations. Similarly, Brooks and Everett (2008) also show how future
plans and aspirations are integral to the ways in which young migrants strategize to
accumulate social and cultural capital. This can be in the form of choosing which
institutions to study at or making plans for the subsequent migration destination upon
graduation.
At the same time, these key moments in the lives of young people are not
disconnected from the changing gendered, classed, and intergenerational relations
shaping their decisions about mobility at the sites of family and community. Whether

these relations play out as constraints or opportunities, and are advantageous or
disadvantageous towards them (Langevang and Gough, 2009; Ansell et al., 2011),
there is a sense that their mobility is not always smooth and straightforward. Instead
there are constant negotiations that take place throughout the course of migration –
from the ‘points’ of departure to arrival and perhaps eventual return. All these
‘points’ present complex situations, relations, and often emotional dilemmas that
need to be examined in relation to the young people’s personal understanding of
growing up in a world that is increasingly porous and interconnected. The rhythms of

16


growing up not only shape their subjectivities at the level of the ‘everyday’; they are
also simultaneously shaped by young people’s experiences of other (competing)
rhythms across different sites and scales.
Jarvis et al. (2011: 519) conceptualize this convergence of different rhythms
at various scales as a form of ‘multi-scalar rhythms’, whereby “the ways in which
different aspects of space, time, and lifecourse intersect in relation to the multiplicity
of demands” that are experienced on a daily basis. At one level, this is a call for
scholars who are interested in deploying the lifecourse perspective to also examine
the time-space coordination found in banal practices, actions and narratives. But it is
also, as they argue, exactly the attendance to negotiation and coordination of
everyday life across multiple time-spaces that will expose the asymmetry of power
relations and the instability of structures. A similar argument can be found in writings
from geographies of young people. Hopkins and Pain (2007) argued that everyday
social interactions with different groups of people produce and re-shape discourses
about age, and that ‘age’ should thus be understood as fluid and relational over and
within the lifecourse. This means that the predominant view that biological age
structures one’s lifecourse mobilities and trajectories is no longer tenable, and instead
age itself as a social category is “constantly produced in and through the experiential

plane(s) of everyday life” (Barker et al., 2009: 5).
Taken together, these studies suggest that even if migration appears to be one
of the many events occurring in one’s lifecourse, the idea that there is a ‘right time’ to
move (Metcalfe, 2006) reflects the assumptions that people make about their lives in
the past, present, and future. Whether these assumptions are figments of the mind or
products of material relations, a close examination of the specific timings and
spacings of these narratives can open up more critical understandings of student

17


migrants as young, aspiring, and embodied beings.

2.3.2

‘Scholarization’ of Young People’s Lives
A study that focuses on student migrants’ experiences cannot sidestep the

question of their educational experiences. Institutions such as schools and universities
are central to the dissemination of information and values, as well as providing spaces
in which students encounter similarities and differences. As Philo and Parr (2000:
514) argue, institutional settings “restrain, control, treat, ‘design’ and ‘produce’
particular and supposedly improved versions of human minds and bodies”. This view
has also been termed by Ennew (1994: 126) as the “scholarization” of young people’s
lives, where temporal scheduling and spatial containment have become remarkably
intense in the production of children, youths, and adults. Viewing young people’s
educational experiences in this manner also means being cognizant that their social
relations, practices and identities are often structured, produced, and shaped through
the institutionalization, normative ordering and daily practices of time in a variety of
spaces operating simultaneously in their lives (McGregor, 2004; Hopkins, 2010).

As Holloway et al. (2011: 2) note in the context of neoliberalizing knowledge
economies “because education for all seems to offer the route to social mobility for
aspirational individuals”, it is a resource highly valued by young people. In this sense,
education is often held as a key site through which the body learns to become ‘better’,
more skillful and knowledgeable, and instilled with values. Yet, social geographers
have also pointed out that the places in which education is carried out are often places
where inequalities are reproduced. Here, the promise of education is problematized
through an exposure of the power geometries that cut across ethnicity, gender,
sexuality, and disability (Burgess and Wilson, 2005; Holloway and Valentine, 2003;

18


Holt, 2007; Johnston et al., 2007; Mac an Ghaill, 1994; Skelton and Valentine, 2002).
These authors have argued that bodies are marked out as ‘in place’ or ‘out of place’
through various discourses and practices that circulate within and beyond the
boundaries of the school, thus rendering young people differential access to resources
and mobilities. Hollingworth and Archer (2010: 598) have also demonstrated how
“feelings about place” in terms of positive attachments and fear and disgust have
implications on the children of London’s working-class in terms of their relationship
with education.
However, in the face of such constraints, young students are also shown to be
able to “find ways to circumvent the constructions or bounds placed on their use of
space” (Catling, 2005: 327). For instance, Holloway and Valentine (2000) have
explored the notion of ‘play/playing’ in the construction of young people’s everyday
experiences through their edited volume on children’s geographies, where ‘play’
times and spaces are strategically employed by young people to negotiate
independence, autonomy, and freedom. Similarly, Katz (2004) also showed how
young people’s bodies are reproduced through everyday routines and interactions
through both ‘play’ and ‘work’ – they offer young people opportunities to learn and

transform existing bodily practices, knowledges, and ideas that in turn create new
spaces.
As Hopkins (2011) argue, spaces of education are differently constructed,
contested, and experienced by various groups of people, leading to different degrees
of inclusion and exclusion, comfort and discomfort with inhabiting in host
destinations. In the context of student migrants, these spaces are experienced as a
stretching of socio-spatial relations across borders. As Holloway et al. (2010: 595)
suggest, “rather than focusing on education within specific sites, we [also] need to

19


trace the webs of connections” across different places to show “how sociospatial
practices in each shape children, youth and families’ experience”.

2.3.3 The Networks, Connections, and Ties that Bind
The view that there are transnational spatialities to the intimate lives of
student migrants (as proposed in Section 2.2) draws attention to the ways in which
networks, connections, and relationships are forged across borders. Very often, these
connectivities are enacted between migrants and non-migrants, and contingent upon
the continuous flows and exchange of information, money, and objects, or what
Levitt (2001) calls the economic and social remittances. In this way, the socio-spatial
relations spanning across different places are not disembodied, but rather constituted
through the investment of personal meanings and feelings that enable cross-border
relations to be imagined, articulated and maintained as close and proximate in the
face of geographical distance. In existing literature, geographers and migration
scholars have studied three distinct forms of close ties – family, friendship, and
romance – as intimacies (Giddens, cited by Bell and Coleman, 1999) that bind
migrants and non-migrants together.
Waters's (2005; 2006) study on Hong Kong young trans-migrants who move

to Canada for education discusses how student migrants act as agents for
accumulating social and cultural capital primarily in the form of established networks
and ties, which in turn can be converted into physical and social mobility for the
family over time. Indeed, this is a common migration strategy found in many studies
on East Asian transnational education, whether they are described as ‘parachute’ or
‘satellite’ kids, and ‘astronaut’ or kirogi (‘wild geese’) families (Yeoh et al., 2012).
However, this conceptualization of student migration also appears to be extrapolated

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from the typical Chinese strategic family relations resting on notions of filial piety
and Confucian thought. Concomitantly, it also tends to delimit the understanding of
intimate affiliations and negotiations of intimacy to the site of the family. In Weller's
(2010) study on children’s transfer to new schools, she shows how young people
actively connect and disconnect with friends and family members, constructing each
set of social relations as more ‘intimate’ than the other across specific and strategic
times and spaces. In this sense, circumscribing student migrants’ experiences to that
of the family can potentially reify certain ethno-familial discourses as “rigid
categorizations” that may “fail to recognize [other] elements of identity significant to
individuals and/or collectives" (Weller, 2010: 885). This approach resonates with
Valentine’s (2008a: 2105) observation that "intimacy and care increasingly takes
place beyond the family, for example, through networks of friends and lovers"; that
some close ties “may be more or less meaningful” depending on the interactions that
take place in specific time-space contexts.
One of the most well-established literature on how intimate connections
stretch across places in the context of migration is that of studies on diasporic
communities and their desires for ‘home’ (Brah, 1997; Espiritu, 2003; Blunt, 2005);
and the migratory journeys, practices, and labour involved in the maintenance of
cross-border familial relationships (Bryceson and Vuorela, 2002; Yeoh et al., 2005).

For example, geographers have studied the mobile geographies of home by looking at
the ways in which migrants are able to feel ‘at home’ whilst on the move (dwell-intravelling) and become ‘mobile’ through mobilizing artefacts, imaginations and
practices that enable them to connect ‘home’ in other places and times (travel-indwelling). Through this, it is argued that the traditional place-based concept of home
can no longer explain the realities of migrant experiences and home-making practices

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(Blunt and Dowling, 2006; Fortier, 2001). Shifting their emphasis from ‘home’ to
‘family’, scholars who study transnational families have also argued that despite
being physically dispersed, family members continue to maintain communication
with one another to substitute for physical absence through remittances, letters and
phone calls (Asis et al., 2004; Chamberlain and Leydesdorff, 2004); or negotiate
caring roles and relations with children or elderly kin back in migrant-sending
communities in order to fill the gap of the ‘missing’ family member (Baldassar, 2007;
Gardner, 2006; Parreñas, 2005).
In Conradson and Latham’s (2005b: 294) work on New Zealand young transmigrants, they highlight that apart from the importance of community and kinship
relations for international mobility, there is also a “remarkable centrality of friendship
networks” to the configurations of their transnational practices, mobilities, and
trajectories. Brooks and Waters (2010) have also shown that friendship networks
operate alongside kinship and romantic relationships to shape transnational mobility
in many overlapping ways. As Pahl (2006) has argued, friendship is something that
needs to be nurtured, and this relational work is often predicated on both negotiations
around material returns that the sociality might generate as well as the affective sense
of connection deriving from the activities, interactions and times spent together. In
this sense, “friendship is important because it is a key aspect of patterns of sociability
and the recognition (or not) of solidarities and communal belonging” (Bowlby, 2011:
605). At the same time, because friendships (like any other social relations) do not
operate outside the exchanges of personal knowledges and information, it is not just
any form of sociality but one that can be considered as intimate and has immense

potential in shaping both individual aspirations and human dynamics (Jamieson,
1998).

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The third form of intimacy – cross-border romance – is only just beginning to
receive attention by scholars in recent years. Cross-border romance can be
differentiated into a variety of (perhaps interconnected) ‘phenomena’ such as penpals,

internet

dating,

commercially-arranged

marriages,

and

long-distance

relationships (Padilla et al., 2007). Through examining these intimate interactions and
exchanges, Constable (2003) argues that variants of romance on the ‘global stage’
operate through the highly complex spatialities, politics, and cultures of gender, race,
nationality, and other socio-material forces.
Collectively, these works have demonstrated the range of caring efforts and
affects, as well as the social, economic and cultural politics that undergird these
practices, which are invested in the ‘doing’ of transnational networks, connections
and relationships. While some scholars have argued that traditional sites of intimacy

such as that of family and marriage are undergoing challenges from a wider set of
affiliations that can now be considered intimate, geographers and migration scholars
have also documented the resilience of family ties in the maintenance of emotional
proximity between migrants and those who are ‘left behind’ (Parreñas, 2005; Yeoh et
al., 2005; Pratt, 2009). These entanglements are further complicated by the rapid
changes in technologies of communication and transport. In addressing this aspect of
how contemporary intimacies are transformed, Valentine (2006) notes that
transnational practices in making contact, maintaining co-presence, and coordinating
household arrangements have already begun to change; and these shifting practices
both reflect and constitute the spatial patterns and temporal rhythms of intimate
relationships.

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2.3.4 The Social (Re)production of Everyday Life
In centering students at the heart of the everyday, quotidian, and transnational
geographies of education migration, geographers have expounded on the power of
space and place in producing, differentiating, and maintaining the socio-interactions
and relations of these young people on the move. Whether these are discussed
through their class-travelling aspirations, youthful impulses, changing subject
positions and identities, or the connectivities and ties that bind them with people and
places afar, there is a strong underlying concern with how these bodies learn to labour
(c.f. Willis, 1977) across space and time. Firstly, labour here is taken to be all forms
of embodied and affective work. As this thesis will ensue, migrant bodies have to
adjust to new socio-cultural environments; invent ways of establishing and
maintaining relationships with families, friends and other important members in their
lives; negotiate transitional and transnational identities and subject positions; and
attend to their own aspirations. Secondly, as suggested by Katz’s (2004: x)
conceptualization that “social reproduction embodies the whole jumble of cultural

forms and practices that constitute and create everyday life and the meanings by
which people understand themselves in the world”, it is important to understand these
body-works and labour as central to the social (re)production of student migrants’
everyday lives. Hitherto, what we have witnessed is a dominant emphasis on the
multiple ways in which spaces are complicit in the social ordering of everyday life
across migration, education, and transnational space. Yet, geographer Allan Pred
(1981: 10, emphasis in original) has argued “the details of social reproduction,
individual socialization, and structuration are constantly spelled out by the
intersection of particular individual paths with particular institutional projects
occurring at specfic temporal and spatial locations”. It follows that social

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reproduction is both a spatial and temporal affair.
Indeed, one of the key theoretical abstractions I have tried to highlight above
(Section 2.3.1-2.3.3) is that of ‘time’. Inspired by feminist scholars’ earlier work on
women’s experiences of time-space, as well as recent geographical debates on the
temporal character of space and spatial character of time (Massey, 2005; May and
Thrift, 2004), I am interested in reflecting on, and making clear, how ‘time’ is also
complicit in the production of student migrants’ intimate lives. Central to this
argument is Henri Lefebvre’s (1991; 2004) work on rhythmanalysis, which builds on
the idea that time-space interaction undergirds everyday processes through repetitions
of ‘linear’ and ‘rhythmic’ times. He argues that the body inhabits the spaces between
the self and society as well as lives out their different temporalities; and it is through
this interaction between bodies, space, and time that social reproduction takes place.
Reflecting on Lefebvre’s work on rhythmanalysis, Simonsen (2005) writes that the
concept of ‘rhythms’ “can be defined as movement and differences in repetition, as
the interweaving of concrete times, but it always implies a relation of time to space or
place”. It is this underscoring of the differences in repetition, relationality across

multiple ‘times’, and the deep implications between ‘time’ and ‘space’ that will form
the basis for me to examine student migration as an arena for the making,
maintenance, and resistance of the routinizing effects of globalizing education spaces.

2.4

Unfolding Cartographies of Time
This section leads to a discussion of ‘time’ as a “socially constructed

medium” and which is “not a self-evident category against which the world can be
measured” (Crang, 2011: 331). Hence, there is a need to make clear the ways in
which time is folded into the everyday fabric of social life. In the history of

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