Abstract
In this chapter, I look at Asian international students in Australia and Singapore and their disconnectedness with local students. Here I suggest that these students create parallel societies for themselves in the host nation based on their identities as international students or as diasporic nationals. These parallel societies while impermanent exist for the benefit and support of their members throughout their transience. Through extensive interviews with 106 international students from Asia across established international education hub in Australia and emerging international student destination in Singapore, my research reveals that these students hold aspirations for cosmopolitan mobility with ambitions to live and work in the big cities of Europe, North America and Asia with a view to return to the home nation eventually or possibly in the future. Moreover my study reveals that the respondents’ cosmopolitan mobility is encouraged by their lived experiences in Australia and Singapore. Here I highlight their ability to form friendship networks with fellow international students from their home nation and from elsewhere in Asia. This they do, for a range of reasons, in lieu of friendships with locals. I also refer to their capacity to find a sense of belonging to their home nation through rapid developments in communication and media technologies.
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Notes
- 1.
In 2010–2011, education services brought in AUD$16.3 billion through full-fee-paying international students. By the end of 2013, there were 525,177 international students (including exchange students) enrolled in education institutions throughout Australia (Department of Education, Australia, 2014). In the early 2000s, the Singapore government began to imagine itself as a global education hub host to diverse public and private institutions of higher learning from local and foreign education providers attracting international students from the region and elsewhere. This was done through the Global Schoolhouse initiative which witnessed diverse institutions and programmes establishing themselves in the nation-state in 2002 followed by the launch of the Singapore Education brand in 2003 which was meant to promote Singapore as a ‘premier education hub’ with the aim of attracting international students (Dessoff, 2012, p. 19).
- 2.
‘Others’ include Eurasians who make up less than 1 per cent of the Singaporean population (Singapore Tourism Board, 2015). Eurasians have a mixed raced ancestry who developed a unique culture of their own which married both East and West traditions. This East-West hybridity stems from a European (Portuguese, Dutch and British) and Asian (Malay, Chinese and Indian) ancestry. For more information, please see the Eurasian Association website (Eurasian Association, 2015). Eurasians in Malaysia are historically and culturally similar.
- 3.
The four official languages of Singapore are English, Mandarin, Tamil and Malay. However English is the language of choice for government and education.
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I acknowledge with thanks the valuable contributions of respondents participating in this study and the Australian Research Council for funding this research.
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Gomes, C. (2017). Disconnections with the Host Nation and the Significance of International Student Communities: A Case Study of Asian International Students in Australia and Singapore. In: Tran, L., Gomes, C. (eds) International Student Connectedness and Identity. Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education, vol 6. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2601-0_6
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