Infrastructures of immobility: enabling international distance education students in Africa tonotmove

Abstract

There is now a large literature discussing how mobilities are part of contemporary everyday power geometries and is a resource to which people have unequal access. This body of work has, thus, valorised mobility as a desirable good. Why some people choose immobility and what has to be mobilised to enable this immobility has received much less attention. This paper draws on interviews with international distance education students in Namibia and Zimbabwe studying at the University of South Africa (UNISA) to explore the spatio-temporal underpinnings to why students choose to remain at home while studying abroad and how this is arranged. It outlines the infrastructures of reach that enable student immobility and how their incomplete nature means that students have to rely on extensive systems of mobilities of other people and objects to ensure that their study progresses without their own educational mobility. In doing so we move away from considering immobility as a result of limited access to mobility. Instead, we set out a new research agenda on why and how the infrastructures of immobilities are important in mobility research.

The same course, different access: the digital divide between urban and rural distance education students in South Africa

“…The research employed a mixed method approach which firstly involved collecting demographic data from a total of 230 (a subset from the IDEAS project dataset) local undergraduate UNISA students through an online questionnaire survey, which was developed and implemented as part of the project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa (Mittelmeier et al, Submitted). This was followed by in-depth individual online interviews, where questions on student adaptation to college questionnaire (SACQ; Mittelmeier et al, 2019), social media usage (Madge et al, 2019), migration plans (Breines et al, 2019) and other cross-cutting themes such as location of access to a computer and internet, and the university education level of parents were asked. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, coded and organised into themes and sub-themes using the NVivo software.…”

Conceptualizing Internationalization at a Distance: A “Third Category” of University Internationalization

“…Within IaD, we also recognize that the boundaries between "home" and "international" student are blurred, as they have been traditionally defined in IA or IaH contexts in light of international mobility and/or possession of a student visa. In IaD, students cannot be assumed to be geographically mobile across international borders and, indeed, may use distance or blended learning provisions as opportunities to remain immobile (Breines et al, 2019) and purposefully stay within their own home contexts. In many cases, distance learning students are also not eligible for student visas (where necessary) and distance learning providers cannot legally sponsor student visas.…”

Distance education as socio‐material assemblage: Place, distribution, and aggregation

“…Many African DE universities supplement their learning material with classes and contact sessions to try and overcome these unstable networks, students may also access libraries and computer laboratories on campus; however, this would be voluntary and not be a formal intervention. However, the reality is that infrastructure often remains patchy (Breines et al, ). Forming connections in the African context requires flexibility, fluidity, and an ability to adapt when the existing networks fail to bring the student and university together.…”

“…The online technologies and specific learning interface shape how students engage with UNISA and with other students (Breines et al, ). This becomes a path for both aggregating students and allowing them to coordinate the approach to studying at a distance.…”

“…In DE, the university is materialised as both distributed and aggregated. Multiple agencies come together in both informal and formal systems to facilitate this (Rizvi & Lingard, ), pointing to the everyday act of infrastructural maintenance and ongoing entanglements with the materialities of education, which do indeed make this “placelessness” of education possible (Breines, Raghuram, & Gunter, ). Seeing the university through these functionalities offers a way forward for future research in the new geographies of learning (Ross, Gallagher, & Macleod, ).…”