Building upon recent work on higher education mobility, this paper contends that social networks of friendship and kinship are critical determinants for students deciding to study overseas, not just, as has hitherto been suggested, a complementary factor. It uses original data collected through interviews and focus groups with thirty-eight higher education international students studying at three UK universities and argues that students who choose to study overseas do not operate within a vacuum but rather draw upon extended networks of individuals who have chosen to do so themselves or advocate studying abroad. While this encouragement may be of an explicit and unequivocal nature-telling students that they ought to study overseas-for the majority it is rather more implicit. The students interviewed invariably related that higher education overseas or mobility more generally was an accepted practice amongst their peers, thereby leading to a normalisation of the mobility process. The paper concludes that international students come to accept mobility as a taken for granted stage within the lifecourse, and, whether intentionally or not, this is often the driving force behind their decision to study overseas. emergent understanding. Their studies of, inter alia, employability and the building of social and cultural capital have advanced the field at pace. However, hitherto, considerations of how students make the decision to study overseas, and in particular how they mobilise their social networks in so doing, are underdeveloped. While past research has asserted that patterns of mobility are often shaped by the relationships between people (Brooks and Waters 2010; Szelényi 2006), we know little about how international students utilise these networks or their effects. The notable exception is Collins' study of Korean students studying in Auckland, but this focuses on the role of education agents and immigrant entrepreneurs as being "bridges to learning" in facilitating the movement of international students (2008b, pp.399) rather than on social networks per se. This paper, by point of departure, shows that these relationships are key to determining whether mobility actually takes place. It asserts that these social networks directly shape the geographies of international students by detailing how they are part of complex communities already in motion without which both shape their decision to study abroad and their place of study. In contrast to Brooks and Waters (2010), it looks at students engaging both in mobility from Western countries and mobility from the East to the West. This paper therefore represents the first dedicated, systematic analysis of these dynamics. In so doing, it does not contend that social networks are the only influence on mobility. As the international student mobility literature shows, they are influenced by an array of different factors such as the financial and cultural implications, their intended career paths and even their understandings of place (see Beech 2014). My point is that with...
This paper develops and extends the recent work on international student mobility by expanding beyond the traditional push-pull factors of migration to show that students are influenced by more than the economic in their decision of where to study. It uses original data collected through interviews and focus groups with 38 higher education international students at three UK universities located in Aberdeen, Belfast and Nottingham to show that when students choose to study overseas they are influenced by diverse perceptions of place that they have constructed over long periods of time. These imaginative geographies are the direct result of exposure to a range of different media, as well as stories relayed to them from members of their social networks. This paper demonstrates that students studying in Scotland and Northern Ireland appear to have highly developed imaginative geographies in relation to their chosen study sites. By contrast, international students studying in England tended to have little conception of their chosen place of study. In this case the powerful imaginative geographies that had been instilled within them focused on London, overshadowing their understanding of their chosen study site.
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