ABSTRACT
One of the key rationales for internationalization used by Canadian higher education institutions to legitimate what has become an industry in student recruitment is that of educating for global citizenship, intercultural learning, and developing skills to remain competitive in a global marketplace. This chapter challenges the notion of internationalization as a naturally occurring phenomenon, much like globalization or multiculturalism, and argues that it is an ideological frame produced through texts such as definitions and policies. The analysis in this theoretical chapter is informed by concepts in Dorothy Smith’s institutional ethnography, a method of inquiry, which, conceptually, offers a way to see how textual practices impact people’s lives. The chapter argues that the texts of ‘international’ and ‘internationalization’ form the ruling relations of the internationalizing university. Texts such as definitions of internationalization, federal policies, and multiculturalism are analyzed to show how they order the lives of international students from Asia discursively. International students, from Asia in particular, are constructed as the bearers of culture and as economic assets, and yet their cultural differences are mostly contained and their racialization made invisible.
