ABSTRACT

Transnational higher education (TNHE) has been characterised as a crude form of market-driven internationalisation, often targeting immobile student populations in countries with high demand for international academic degrees. In response to recent scholarship on the role of higher education internationalisation in facilitating and producing diasporic networks, this study examines its inverse: how TNHE services existing diasporic communities in situ by mobilising institutions across borders rather than student bodies. It specifically examines these dynamics within the United Arab Emirates (UAE), simultaneously host to one of the largest concentrations of TNHE globally and a five million-member diasporic community of long-term, yet impermanent residents from South Asia. Drawing on interviews with South Asian students in undergraduate degree programmes at three British international branch campuses (IBCs), it explores how students perceive their IBCs as strategic sources of valuable degree capitals for enhancing employment opportunities in the UAE and securing against precarity and uncertain futures as perpetually impermanent residents. The research implicates the role of TNHE in diaspora policymaking, asking how IBCs function as an extension of a limited social contract between a diasporic community and its ‘host’ state.

摘要

跨国高等教育 (TNHE) 被描述为市场驱动的国际化的一种粗略形式，通常针对对国际学位需求量很大的国家的固定学生群体。为了回应最近关于高等教育国际化在促进和产生侨民网络方面的作用的学术研究，本研究审视了其反面：TNHE 如何通过动员跨境机构而不是学生团体来为现有的侨民社区提供服务。它专门研究了阿拉伯联合酋长国 (UAE) 内的这些动态，同时拥有全球最大的 TNHE 集中地之一和一个拥有 500 万成员的来自南亚的长期但临时居民的散居社区。通过对三个英国国际分校 (IBC) 本科学位课程的南亚学生的采访，它探讨了学生如何将他们的 IBC 视为宝贵学位资本的战略来源，以增加阿联酋的就业机会并防止不稳定和不确定的未来作为永久无常的居民。该研究涉及 TNHE 在侨民政策制定中的作用，询问 IBC 如何作为侨民社区与其“东道国”之间有限社会契约的延伸。