The next virtual meeting will take place on Friday, May 17, 2019 at 9am Pacific/12pm Eastern time (US/Canada), and feature Dr. Abigail Boggs.
Dr. Bogg’s talk is entitled “The Noncitizen Student, the State and Capital: On The Transnational Politics of the Neoliberal University.” The abstract follows:
This talk will explore a number of questions about the contemporary politics of U.S. higher education, the transnational movement of students, and with them money and ideas, and the particular and at times conflicting investments of the U.S. government, institutions of higher education, and structures of capitalism in the presence of international students in the United States. As the travel ban’s targeting of students from majority Muslim countries and the particular concern regarding Chinese students suggest, immigration law is unevenly applied, targeting populations marked as racially and or culturally outside of the presumptive U.S. norm of whiteness and Christianity. As such, a key question becomes, what to the U.S. nation-state is the population of nonwhite, non-Christian, noncitizen students? And what is the related yet distinct meaning of this population to capital? How might looking to the relationships of the state and capital to nonwhite, non-Christian, noncitizen students lay bare the entanglements of the state and capital with each other, their distinct interconnections with U.S. universities, and the political, economic, and socially reproductive work institutions of higher education perform to the benefit of the United States as at once a governmental and economic formation? In this talk, I explore a series of flash points in the history of the U.S. state’s efforts to manage the recruitment, education, and movement of nonwhite, non-Christian, noncitizen students through immigration and visa policy. Here, I am particularly concerned with what such an exploration can make evident about the work of U.S. universities as institutions that serve the demographic needs of the state and capital while simultaneously obscuring and smoothing the seeming contradictions between the liberal state’s desire for an homogenous population and capital’s need for an heterogeneous labor force. Though the particular case studies I turn to here trace the historical development of immigration policies impacting noncitizens students from the 1921 Emergency Quota Act to the 1964 Immigration and Naturalization Act, they set the precedent for the laws and policies governing noncitizen students in the contemporary moment. I conclude with a consideration of the emergent demographic politics of neoliberalism as a specific mode of capitalist governmentality.
The first virtual meeting of the Critical Internationalization Studies Network, featuring guest speaker Chrystal George Mwangi, occurred in September 2018. You can view a video recording of our session here.
The second virtual meeting took place in January 2019, and featured guest speakers Riyad Shahjahan, Annabelle Estera, and Vivek Vellanki. You can listen to an audio recording of our session here:
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