“Freedom in Flux” and “Were You Guys OK Before the Pandemic?”: A Conversation on International Students, Academic Mobilities, Higher Education, and Society at Large

Editorial

“…Within a short period of time, a huge amount of COVID-19-induced scholarship was produced to warn HE of the danger of relying on mobility and internationalization for its operation and purpose. This body of work also offers alternatives to rethink and reimagine HE in the years to come (see, e.g., Hage, 2020; Mok et al, 2022; Cortez Ochoa and Phan, 2022; Phùng and Phan, 2021; Tilak and Kumar, 2022; Yang and Tian, 2023). Against this pandemic backdrop and its implications for global higher education, the many positive transformations as well as the many upbeat possibilities for transformation associated with inter-Asian mobilities and the mobility-driven internationalization in Asia’s HE that were well documented, examined, discussed, and brought to the fore in the first part of our SI (published in September 2021) suddenly looked somewhat irrelevant, as during that time the pandemic still did not show signs of easing in some parts of the world, particularly Asia.…”