Shaping Asia Through Student Mobilities

Abstract

While most Asian students still opt for Western universities when envisioning international destinations, growing numbers turn to Asian countries and their universities. This new development has received increasing attention among practitioners and policy makers, while social science research only recently turned to Asia-to-Asia students’ international flows. This contribution offers, first, a literature review, reflecting on trends and the magnitude of inter-Asian students’ movements. These movements are seen as multiple and complex mobilities, not only in spatial but also in the social and ideational sense. Student strategies in making choices while moving to foreign Asian universities as well as their pathways within the social spaces of universities—paying attention to the multiscalar dimensions of movements and the assemblages they recreate—constitute the second part of the article. The third and main part discusses what we learn about the changing shape of Asia while following students’ pathways and aspirations. These movements shape Asia’s academic space that is embedded in the shifting dimensions of Asian economies, polities, social negotiations, cultures, and values.