ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how dominant narratives about transnational education contribute to constructing the identities of transnational students. It shows how and in what ways these students’ identities are, on the one hand, painted and confirmed by social perceptions, official narratives following government reports and investigations, media shaping, and narratives shared by individuals. I also show accounts where students resist certain social stigmas about their identities and the widespread condemnation of the low-quality and intense mediocrity of transnational programs, therefore claiming another identity for themselves. At the same time, I demonstrate how in transnational contexts, students’ identities can be developed in new ways as their relationships with the immediate local surroundings, with Asia, ‘the West’, English, and other languages are altered through the course of their studies with flow-on effects for their future pathways and outlooks.
