“A lot of research about international students wasn’t very good”

You recently started the website “Research with International Students”. What’s the idea behind the website and who should read it?

Sot of by accident, I had a few projects in a row where we wrote systematic reviews of existing research, including one review where we synthesized over 900 written research articles about internationalisation. As we were writing these, we started to notice that there was a lot of research about international students that, to say plainly, wasn’t very good. A lot of research relied on stereotypes of international students or portrayed them through deficit lens by assuming they had fewer skills than home students or needed to “assimilate” into existing education structures. We generally wanted to see more criticality in research on this topic which engaged more with seeing difference rather than deficiency, seeing international students as partners and questioning how practices in universities could be transformative and interculturally inclusive. So we started gathering resources for researchers who include international students as participants in their studies, which eventually led to the Research with International Students website. It includes a lot of resources for researchers and also practitioners, including reading lists, a theoretical framework bank, an “anti-glossary” of terms, and a blog, among others. We see it as a starting point for anyone who is doing research or developing practice with international students.

You are also editing the upcoming book “Research with International Students” that will be the basis for the hybrid “Research with International Students Conference” in December. What will be the main themes of the book and the conference?

The Research with International Students book led organically from the website, where we brought together 49 different scholars around the world to write 26 chapters about different facets of research that includes international students as participants. This is developed across five sections, which each focus on a different area of research design. It encourages readers to consider what currently hinders critical research and how narratives about international students can be made more complex, thinking about issues like the intersection of migrant student status with race, gender, sexuality, disability or class. We also encourage readers to re-conceptualise taken-for-granted topics like, for example, what does ‘global’ mean? Then finally, we focus on research designs and methods, thinking about how research can be made more ethical and critical through the way data is collected.

We will be hosting an international conference to celebrate the launch of the book, taking place December 11 -12. The conference will be hybrid, both online and in person in Manchester, UK. Our intention with the conference is to create a network of researchers who care about critical considerations impacting research on this topic. In particular, we aim to centre intersectional inequalities in research, thinking about how research can shift problematic narratives about international students in universities. We will also focus on how research with international students might be re-imagined for the future. More information about the conference is available at the conference website.

Looking ahead: What do you see as the biggest challenges and research gaps in research with and about international students?

One of the biggest challenges about research with international students is that there is such a large volume of research, which makes it difficult to synthesise and understand what “good practice” looks like. At the same time, the vast majority of existing research focuses on single-site case studies, meaning we know very little about how innovative ideas might be transferred to other contexts. I would argue that we need a lot more cross-contextual, international and comparative, and longitudinal research to help us create a more sophisticated understanding of “what works” in internationalisation.

Research with international students also tends to approach research through an assimilative lens, where international students are assumed to need to change to adapt to existing provisions and practices. I find this problematic, because much of the research centres on what international students are assumed to lack, rather than thinking about their agency. Research often portrays international students as less skilled, less adapted, or less knowledgeable than home students, which then adds to this cycle within practice where international students are problematically assumed to be deficient or lower quality students. I would like to see more research in the future start to critique these assumptions and to think instead about how our university systems may unfairly disadvantage international students. Placing the blame on unjust systems rather than marginalised individuals is a more ethical approach to both research and practice for the future.