ABSTRACT
Research with international students has too often adopted deficit framings, positioning international students as lacking skills, knowledge, and attitudes. Superficially, this often seeks to better understand challenges to support learning or experiences. Cumulatively, such framings systematically reinforce representations of international students as lesser, marginalized, and undesirable. Reinforced by intersecting dynamics of marketisation and postcolonialism, recruiting countries take the quality of their education systems for granted, ‘evidenced’ by their capacity to attract international students. This situates international students as subaltern petitioners receiving the ‘high-quality education of the host country’. The presence of international students highlights structural equity problems within higher education systems. By locating the ‘problem’ in students, whether individualised or racialised by ethnic groups, this vein of research avoids asking more radical, critical questions of internationalised higher education structures that systematically disadvantage international students. Future research needs to centre anti-racist, decolonial approaches to both methodology and project design, and we offer an example of this.
