ABSTRACT
The introduction clarifies how this study approaches international students’ feelings not so much as accounts of the truth of their experiences as entry points to unravel the ways in which their feelings have been represented to govern them as subjects of the border. It illustrates how the most common representations of international students in public discourses as emotionally suffering, ‘ideal’ and ‘bogus’ migrants have elicited their differential inclusion in national collectives in the form of affective responses of compassion and resentment. In foregrounding genealogy as a method to provide these affective responses with a history, the introduction moreover advances this study as a model for a new strand of analyses that challenge the epistemic legacy of educating the ‘other’ in the manners of the culturally hegemonic ‘West’ in Australia as well as in other English-speaking nations.
