ABSTRACT
Introduction: ‘building a home for talent’ Since the Asian Financial Crisis, Singapore’s policy-makers have intensified efforts at diversifying the city-state’s economy in order to maintain its competitive advantage. A crucial dimension of this project involves making Singapore into a knowledge hub – a desirable place for capital and ‘brain power’ represented in the knowledge, credentials, and networks of highly skilled professionals, scientists, entrepreneurs, and international students (Ong, 2007). Toward this end, Singapore has embarked on a series of rebranding exercises to consolidate its identity as an Intelligent Island, Global Schoolhouse, Asia’s Biopolis, and Global Asia Business Hub, distinguishing itself from its histories as trading entrepot and manufacturing outpost (Economic Development Board [EDB], 2013). Notwithstanding shifts in identity, Singapore depicts a consistent political rationality of governing the economy with the state at the helm, articulating and regulating global flows, and providing discursive and material resources to steer education and research toward productive ends. With knowledge-economy metaphors at the heart of this imaginary, the National University of Singapore (NUS) has become a key site for both the elaboration of these metaphors and the financial and political investments that have given it material form. NUS itself has become a key strategic actor in Singapore’s aspirations to become a knowledge and education hub, a Global Schoolhouse. This paper
offers an examination of international student experiences of this project, which points to some of its contingencies, contradictions, and incompleteness.
