Despite rapid growth in the student component of global migration flows, the study of international student migration/mobility (ISM) is a relatively neglected field in migration research. This special issue helps to address this lacuna. This introductory paper highlights the contradictions between international students as ‘desired’ because of their internationalism and fee contributions, and as ‘unwanted’ because of the politics of migration control especially in the context of the securitisation of study in the post 9/11 scenario. It argues that interrogating the terms ‘international’ and ‘students’ is critical to addressing the slipperiness that underlies these contradictions. Focusing on students per se ignores their multiple roles, as family members, actual or potential workers, or perhaps refugees and asylum‐seekers, while definitions of international students ignore the diversity of study that students undertake. After summarising the papers that follow, this paper concludes with an agenda for future research on ISM: greater theoretical insight drawing on the cognate field of mobility studies; more in‐depth ethnographic research on mobile students who recognise their multiple roles in knowledge diffusion and social reproduction; further research on ISM datasets and quantitative surveys, which employs statistical analysis; more attention paid to gender and race as they relate to ISM; and a stronger link to pedagogy and systems of higher education and knowledge production. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Student migration is a key component of knowledge migration. However, as knowledge becomes a central part of migrant selectivity, labour and family migrants too are involved in knowledge acquisition, both prior to and after migration. At the same time, student migrants are involved in work and family, just like other migrants. What then is distinctive about student migrants? This paper attempts to address this challenge. It begins by reviewing how migration theories have analysed student mobility. It then suggests that migration theorists need to extend existing analyses, which have primarily focused on the spatialities of migration, to take account of the spatialities of knowledge. It is argued that knowledge institutions need to reach out to people in different parts of the world and to produce in prospective students a desire to circulate. This is necessary if the institutions are to obtain a global presence and to maintain their legitimacy as knowledge brokers. An analysis of student migration where the inducements that the Higher Education Institutions offer to prospective students and the subjective responses of such students to these invitations will throw light on how the spatiality of knowledge is achieved and also highlight the distinctiveness of student migration in a knowledgeable migrant world. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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mitigating deepening global inequalities. As a result a range of institutions and individuals have become involved in studying, fostering and more recently critiquing the range of programmes and practices that can be swept under the migration-development nexus (Sørensen et al., 2002). 1Migration and development have long been interlinked Bakewell, 2007). In the fi rst half of the twentieth century, although most such discussions focused on the role of rural-urban migration in development, analysis of international migration and its developmental effects too were recognised in diplomatic as well as academic circles. In the 1950s and 1960s, in what some might call the heydays of developmentalism, treatises were written on the role of migration in development in a variety of locations ranging from Mexico (Randall, 1962) to Australia (Woolmington, 1958), Indonesia (Wertheim, 1959) to Nyasaland 2 (Van Velsen, 1960), to name just a few. Demography and economics were among the fi elds that retained a fi rm interest in the relationship between migration and development, but in most disciplines neo-classical theories of economic growth and the benefi ts of development were largely unquestioned. Interest in migration and development gathered pace through the 1970s and 1980s, but there was now considerable pessimism over the developmental impacts of migration as the developmental loss accrued by poorer countries through the emigration of the skilled, the lack of opportunities to use skills in the destination countries, and the limited impact of remittances on economic growth in origin countries all came to be theorised through the lens of dependency .In recent years several events have intensifi ed interest in the relationship between migration and development. First is the limited success of ABSTRACTIn recent years migration has been rediscovered as a key intervening apparatus in facilitating development, offering a route to mitigating deepening inequalities. National governments, international funding organisations and diasporic organisations have all mobilised migrants to fund development initiatives in 'origin' countries. This has led to a range of calculative processes whereby some forms of migration and particular forms of development come to be visible, while others become 'invisibilised'. This paper explores some narratives of migration and development to illustrate how current debates on migration and development ignore certain scalar politics and specifi c temporalities, while scaffolding others. It suggests new ways of thinking about migration and development.

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