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Abstract

Prospective graduate students from Sub-Saharan Africa continue to choose the United States as their destination for higher education. This choice has always been somewhat of a mixed blessing for African nations; some students return to share the benefits of their education but many stay on in the West. This “brain drain” effect has traditionally been seen as an unavoidable side effect of students’ desires for consumption of American higher education specifically and for the American “consumer” lifestyle more generally. But the current global restructuring of capital and culture offers an opportunity to reevaluate this dynamic and potentially to make adjustments in the ways American universities accommodate their African students. This article draws on a small data set from a case institution to test and articulate an alternative analysis that links desire to production and offers an alternative explanation of globalization and the education of graduate students from the region.

Keywords

Sub-Saharan Africa globalization international graduate education literacy studies

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Globalization and Desire: A Case Study of International Graduate Student Education in Literacy Studies

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