ABSTRACT
One of the key rationales used by higher education institutions to legitimate the recruitment of international students is that their presence supports educational goals of educating for global citizenship, intercultural competence, and intercultural learning for all. In this chapter, I problematize the prevailing discourses of culture in international higher education, which, in practice, emphasize celebratory notions of “other cultures”. Informed by scholarship on critical internationalization, coloniality and anti-racism education, I interrogate prevailing discourses of interculturality that are based on simplistic, static, ahistorical, and hierarchical conceptualizations of culture. I provide three discussion points, commenting on the commodification of culture, coloniality, and culture; multiculturalism; and racialization. International students are constructed as the bearers of culture who bring culture and diversity to institutions and are simultaneously cast as deficient and culturally inferior. Further, uncritical assumptions about culture run the risk of erasing power imbalances. I make the case that researchers investigating international students and intercultural relations need to consider theoretical lenses that can support a nuanced and complex analysis of intercultural relations and learning.
