(Un)wanted bodies and the internationalisation of higher education

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (Un)wanted bodies and the internationalisation of higher education © The Author(s) 2024 Published version Waters, Johanna L; Adriansen, Hanne Kirstine; Møller Madsen, Lene; Saarinen, Taina Waters, J. L., Adriansen, H. K., Møller Madsen, L., & Saarinen, T. (2024). (Un)wanted bodies and the internationalisation of higher education. Progress in Human Geography, OnlineFirst. https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325241257538 2024 Submitted Paper Progress in Human Geography 2024, Vol. 0(0) 1–19 © The Author(s) 2024 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/03091325241257538 journals.sagepub.com/home/phg (Un)wanted bodies and the internationalisation of higher education Johanna L Waters University College London, UK Hanne Kirstine Adriansen Aarhus University, Denmark Lene Møller Madsen University of Copenhagen, Denmark Taina Saarinen University of Jyvaskyla, Finland Abstract In this paper, we foreground the bodies of students and academics in studies of the internationalisation of higher education (IHE) and consider how internationalisation processes are shaped by embodiment and the geographies of (em)placement. Over the past 20 years, IHE has been extensively discussed within academic and policy circles. Such accounts have often been dominated by macro-level concerns. Within these discourses, the international mobility of students and academics have been a central focus. Although scholars within the social sciences are increasingly attentive to the social, cultural, and political dimensions of IHE, there has been little explicit discussion of bodies and the ways in which international mobilities are corporeal, involving in place/out of placeness and the politics and policies governing embodied (im)mobilities. This paper has two main objectives mapping on to two substantive sections. The first is to highlight the importance of the body within recent geographical scholarship and to juxtapose this with a notable absence within IHE research. The second is to consider where the body is present (explicitly or otherwise) in the bountiful literature on IHE and to draw out the meanings of this, arguing that paying attention to bodies exposes the (re)production of exclusionary hierarchies. The paper contributes to a growing corpus of work on the body within geography and extends critical geographies of the internationalisation of higher education. Keywords belonging, bodies, embodiment, global hierarchies, international academics, international students, international higher education Corresponding author: Hanne Kirstine Adriansen, Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Tuborgvej 164, Copenhagen DK-2400, Denmark. Email: [email protected] Introduction ‘From next year, with a few exceptions, students coming from overseas will be barred from bringing their dependants with them when they come to study in the UK […] What they don’t see are women with small children, families without child-supporting networks back home, and students who –reasonably –would not like to be separated from their partners for a long time’ (Malik, 2023, n.p.). Over the past 20 years, the internationalisation of higher education (IHE) has been extensively debated within and across geography and the social sciences (Adriansen and Madsen, 2021;Beech, 2015;Brooks and Waters, 2011;Knight, 2012;Prazeres et al., 2017;Spangler and Adriansen, 2021;Teichler, 2004;Waters, 2017;Waters and Brooks, 2021). Many academic accounts have been preoccupied with what could be termed macro-level concerns: global, national, and institutional policies and governance (e.g. Dale and Robertson, 2009;Robertson, 2005), and the influence that neoliberalisation (Kim, 2009;Marginson and Rhoades, 2002) and academic capitalism (Jessop, 2018) have had on these developments. The ‘skills’or ‘knowledge’associated with higher education have been habitually viewed as portable assets (cf. Raghuram, 2021) and the broader discussion has framed internationalisation as either a neutral or openly beneficial process for all those involved (Madge et al., 2009). The mobility of students and staff has long been associated with the internationalisation of higher education and is widely viewed as one of its pillars (de Wit and Altbach, 2021). And yet the conceptualisation of student/staff mobility (and their social geographies) remains rather circumscribed. Silence often persists around the corporeality of international students and academics; often, their personhood is negated, and their bodies are largely written out of the story. When their bodies are mentioned, they are habitually marked as different: foreign, migrant, immigrant, (dis)abled, racialised, or transnational. They are (dis)placed in ways that are contradictory and unpredictable. As the quotation opening this paper indicates, international (student) bodies are also, disingenuously, assumed to be ‘unencumbered’when it comes to significant others. Academic debates dovetail with policy pronouncements, wherein the ‘international body’is deemed either a desirable commodity or something to be shunned and controlled. Many nation-states covet international talent and reward wanted (desired) individuals with permanent residency or citizenship (Yang, 2018). The Scottish Government, for example, will launch a Talent Attraction and Migration Service (TAMS) in 2024, attempting to boost the number of international students staying in Scotland after graduation (Scottish Government, 2024). These desired bodies are emplaced firmly within the boundaries of the nation-state. International students are actively sought for their ‘fees’(the so-called ‘cash cow’discourse, see Robertson, 2011; Lomer et al., 2021). Conversely, states may actively shun international bodies, preventing or controlling their entry and/or expelling students immediately after their study visa expires (Falkingham et al., 2021). Discourses concerning reducing or capping international student numbers circulate, as recent discussions in Canada attest (Paas-Lang, 2023). In a different context, the UK government announced that international students will no longer be able to bring dependents with them (as indicated in the opening quotation) and subsequently extended this to include skilled migrants (such as international academics); a move that seeks to reduce immigration numbers and facilitate the meeting of immigration targets. It also, however, disregards the fact that many international students and academics have caring responsibilities or may depend on the companionship of significant others (Malik, 2023). The policy will (intentionally or otherwise) prevent international students/academics from feeling at home –putting down roots –whilst maintaining a sensation of being out-of-place (Spangler, 2023). This is an aspect of international student and academic mobility that we explore below. Furthermore, international students and academics are frequently subjected to discrimination and racism (Bhopal and Pitkin, 2020;Lee, 2006; M¨ ahlck, 2013). Within Anglo-American and western European higher education, to be perceived as white is often to experience belonging, whilst embodying 2Progress in Human Geography 0(0) ‘the good researcher’(M¨ ahlck, 2013: 69). Many white western international academics and students thereby benefit from their embodiment. Conversely, black and minority ethnic staff and students may be made to feel out-of-place (Kobayashi and Peake, 2000;Tolia-Kelly, 2010). Esson and Last (2020) introduce some of these issues in relation to UK higher education and geography; in a special section of Area (see also Bhakta, 2020) that includes Ahmet’s (2020) discussion of the experience of black and minority ethnic postgraduate students attending London-based universities. It makes a powerful case for the ways in which feeling out-of-place operates in practice (e.g. in relation to architecture, social spaces and constant representations of white scholars hanging on walls). It can be assumed that these feelings may be experienced equally by both international staff and students within these spaces, even when, in other respects, staff and students may be differentially positioned in relation to the state and their academic institution (staff, for example, may feel more secure in relation to their visa or financial status, housing tenure and future prospects compared to international students). Undoubtedly, the COVID-19 pandemic has elevated the importance of bodies within internationalisation of higher education studies. The closing of nation-state borders and a cessation or reduction of international flights made researchers more aware of how bodies and their mobilities had been hitherto taken for granted. A flurry of academic publications, addressing the implications of pandemic restrictions on international students in particular, have thereby followed (e.g. Fløisdorf and Adriansen, 2023;Hari et al., 2023;Mittelmeier and Cockayne, 2023; Waters, 2020). Many international students were unable to travel to their study destinations and remained ‘stuck’at home –participating in classes online and from a distance (Fløisdorf and Adriansen, 2023). International academics were likewise either ‘stranded’or ‘exiled’(often taking the last possible flight home) (Gourlay, 2020;Nachatar Singh and Chowdhury, 2021). The resulting mental health concerns for international students have been partially considered (e.g. Malet Calvo et al., 2022), while they remain surprisingly unaddressed in respect of staff. Amongst other things, the restrictions imposed by states in the wake of COVID-19 have rendered the embodied nature of internationalisation more visible than previously. In this paper, we contribute to a growing corpus of work within geography on embodiment and centre the bodies of students and academics in discussions of the internationalisation of higher education. We define ‘the body’after Moss and Dyck (2003) as: ‘multiple and varied discursive formations that inscribe corporeal vessels signifying human being(s). In this sense, there is no single, universal body. There are only multiply differentiated bodies’(p. 58). Additionally, and inspired by Massey (2005),we advocate a relational understanding of bodies. At an ontological level, this entails approaching bodies not as fixed, detached and individual entities, but as encumbered. The individualist understanding of bodies is inherent in much research and policy within internationalisation of higher education, as exemplified in the introductory quote. Instead, we approach bodies relationally with multiple identities, we understand bodies in all their messy attachments to significant others, and we recognise the productive possibilities attached to recognising higher education internationalisation as embodied. A relational understanding of bodies makes it possible to study bodies as interconnected and constructed through social encounters. We use the definition of internationalisation of higher education offered by de Wit et al. (2015) as: ‘the intentional process of integrating an international,intercultural or global dimension into the purpose,functions and delivery of post-secondary education,in order to enhance the quality of education and research for all students and staff,and to make a meaningful contribution to society”(de Wit et al., 2015: 281, highlighted in original). There are five common instruments of internationalisation: outgoing student mobility, incoming student mobility, academic mobility, English as a medium of instruction and internationalisation at home. This paper touches upon the first three of these, which all concern embodied mobility. In nonAnglophone countries, internationalisation is often operationalised through language (notably, English Medium Instruction) as an ostensibly self-evident prerequisite for mobility (Galloway et al., 2020). Language becomes both a testable skill and a bodily Waters et al. 3 attribute and thus work on language is highly relevant for our analysis. The chosen definition of internationalisation highlights its processual nature; it conceptualises higher education institutions as interconnected through flows and networks. This dynamic understanding is important for this paper, as it resonates with a relational understanding of bodies. We contend that focussing on messy bodies and their geographies is productive, in that it illuminates which bodies are wanted and which are unwanted; which belong and which will be always out-of-place. We thereby highlight neglected issues around global hierarchisation and the production of inequalities within the internationalisation of higher education whilst also introducing a much-needed critical perspective. As geographers, we are attentive to the importance of location and scale, therefore we focus on how nation-states desire and/or detest migrant bodies; how international students and academics are made to feel inor out-of-place through the active ‘othering’of their bodies by nation-states and their institutions; whilst recognising the fundamental role that significant others play within experiences of the internationalisation of higher education. Many of these issues find resonance with recent work on critical geographies of migration (Mitchell et al., 2019) and we will briefly discuss these below. It should be noted that higher education institutions consist of more than the bodies of ‘students’and ‘academics’(there are many other persons present within this space). Furthermore, the demarcation of students and academics is also, to a certain extent, artificial –students can also be academics and viceversa whilst at the same time adopting multiple other roles and identities. However, for the sake of clarity, we focus only on the explicit discussion of international students and academics here (Cheng et al., 2023). The remainder of the paper has two main objectives mapping on to two substantive sections. The first objective is to highlight the importance of the body within recent geographical scholarship and to juxtapose this with its notable absence within IHE research. Section one consequently offers a brief discussion of literature taking up the notion of body in geography. This is followed by a review of scholarship across geography and the social sciences on the internationalisation of higher education, highlighting how the bodies of students and academics have been omitted and considering the implications of this disembodying. The second objective is to consider areas where the body is present (explicitly or otherwise) in the bountiful literature on IHE and to draw out the meanings of this. This second section of the paper therefore analyses the notion of (un)wanted bodies, with a focus on three overlapping themes: (1) states and (un) wanted bodies; (2) othering and (un)wanted difference; and (3) students’/academics’embodied entanglements with significant others. We consider the polarised ways in which bodies within IHE are often positioned as wanted (valued) or unwanted (burden/ alien) or as in-place or out-of-place, and reflect upon what this tension means for how bodies might be understood within IHE. The body in geography and migration research, and its absence in IHE As outlined above, in this section of the paper we first consider how ‘the body’has been discussed within geographical scholarship to date before focussing specifically on work on critical geographies of migration, within which the body has been conspicuously present. We then reflect upon the relative disembodiment of IHE scholarship and its implications. The body in geography Tuan (1977) has famously written about the body in Space and place:The perspective of experience.For Tuan, the body is an integral aspect of space: in short, because the body is in space and takes up space. He was concerned with how the body could be lost in space or, conversely, feel at home. However, Tuan’s agenda was a humanistic one, finding similarities in the experiences of bodies across cultures and time; what he proposed was not a critical geography of the body. Critical debates around the ‘place’of the body in geography emerged in the 1990s with a few key papers in this journal –for example, Longhurst 4Progress in Human Geography 0(0) (1997), which builds on Rose’s (1995) Progress Report on ‘Geography and gender’. Longhurst reveals the costs of the mind/body dualism found throughout geography discourse at the time. In Mind and body spaces:Geographies of illness,impairment and disability (Butler and Parr, 1999), one of two edited volumes from Routledge’sCritical Geographies in 1999 (the other is Teather, 1999), the discussion of mind/body dualities continues. The spatialities of disability and mental health are exposed through the places where those suffering ill health live. In her 2004 book, Longhurst sought to identify ‘some of the ways in which ‘we’both disavow and invoke different kinds of bodies in geographical knowledge’as a form of feminist practice’ (p. 1). This includes acknowledging bodies in all their ‘leaky’and ‘messy’glory. Longhurst’s (1995) feminist critique of the tendency to side-line bodies in research has been instrumental in changing the terms of the debate, wherein she argues that ‘the historical privileging of the conceptual over the corporeal [has resulted] in the production of hegemonic,masculinised and disembodied geographical knowledges’(p. 97). Colls (2007) has likewise called for a critical engagement with bodily matter and materialisation in understanding how societies function. Across the discipline of geography, over the past two decades, bodies have increasingly been prioritised within certain sub-fields. Colls and Evans (2014) build on Longhurst’s scholarship (2004, 2005) in their research on obesogenic environments and the production of (problematic) obesity. Their work is both geographical and foregrounds the importance of bodies, challenging the ubiquitous representation of obesity as being in need of intervention and/or diseased; instead drawing attention to the geographies that both produce obesity and pathologise fat bodies in the first place. Also invoking bodies, Holton (2020) has explored the geographies of hair, arguing that it complicates the (messy) borders of bodies whilst also representing ‘different cultural,ethnic,racialised and gendered identities….it is powerful,yet can also denote suppression,dysfunction and sickness’(n.p.). G¨ okarıksel’s (2009) piece on religious practices presents some different reflections on hair, embodiment and its social geographies. Over the years, the pages of Progress have been instrumental, in fact, in introducing the idea of bodies to many areas of (geographical) scholarship, including retailing and consumption (Crewe, 2001), art (Hawkins, 2013; see also McCormack, 2008), indigeneity (Radcliffe, 2018), health and environment (Senanayake and King, 2019), legal geographies (Jeffrey, 2020), political ecology (Nichols and Del Casino, 2021) and studies of urban enclaves (Waldman and Ghertner, 2023). Perhaps most significant for our arguments has been work on migration, asylum and displacement and we briefly highlight some major contributions in this area, below, before connecting this to work on IHE. Migration and embodiment Internationalisation researchers can learn from how migration scholars have conceptualised embodiment. The ways in which the state perceives and categorises migrant bodies at different scales, for example, has been discussed by Mountz (2018), who focuses on the infliction of violence and trauma (both at the border and within the most intimate and personal spaces of the everyday) on bodies. H¨ akli and Kallio (2021) argue that it is not enough for asylum seekers to be seen as bodies (they are still viewed as an anonymous and passive mass). Rather, the struggle for embodied personhood (the body as person), they argue, is at the centre of asylum seeking, because such a perspective allows for the possibility of agency and resistance, as well as empathy. How the state views and categorises migrants can reflect changes in and to migrant bodies over time. Amrith (2021) discusses ageing bodies in relation to the experiences of temporary migrant domestic workers. In the context of Singapore, aging domestic workers are repatriated once they reach retirement age (in this case, 60 years old), after which they are not permitted to renew their employment contracts and must return home. Their bodies go from productive (wanted) to unproductive (unwanted) literally overnight, with geographical consequences apparent in their impelled ‘return’. As we will argue, IHE often requires similar (temporary) relationships to the host state, involving an analogous control of bodies in space and a discursive tendency to in/ Waters et al. 5 exclude in a way that responds to various temporal rhythms and stretches over time (Enriquez-Gibson, 2022). Gilmartin and Kuusisto-Arponen (2019) explore the role of bodies and borders in critical geographies of migration and highlight a recent focus on the ‘biopolitical’(alongside a more enduring interest in the ‘geopolitical’). They make two key points: (1) the bodies of migrants are habitually categorised and hierarchized resulting in their marginalisation and exploitation and (2) there is much to learn from the embodied experiences of migrants at work. Kuusisto-Arponen and Gilmartin (2019) also consider the role of embodiment in the forced migration of children, highlighting the importance of care and its relational nature. Indeed, this is a point we are keen to make here –that embodied academic mobility is also related to caring relationships with significant others. And Yeoh et al. (2019) discuss ‘corporeal geographies’in the context of labour migration within Asia. They highlight the stratification of migrant bodies by race and gender, but also stress the significance of ‘transitoriness’and the reduced possibilities for permanence within labour migration. Academic migration is also, often, temporary, resulting in a sense of precarity and uncertainty for many international scholars (J¨ ons, 2007) and students (Chacko, 2021). The regulation of bodies from the Global South is a theme taken up in Mayblin and Turner’s (2021) work, where they discuss technologies of bodily control within visa regimes, including identity checks and body scanners, used to mark different bodies as superior or inferior. The maintenance of borders between countries in the Global North and Global South is specifically about controlling the mobility of (un)wanted bodies. At the same time, regional entities such as the European Union have, over the years, sought to eliminate obstacles limiting the mobilities of (wanted) people within its own borders, by removing restrictions such as visas. This apparent contradiction –of different bodily regulation depending on the origin of the body in question –is evident in migration policies throughout the Global North. Clearly, such a snapshot of work on critical geographies of migration and embodiment cannot do justice to a burgeoning field. For the purposes of this paper, however, it is productive to consider what scholarship on IHE might glean from this. First, there is the political nature of embodied mobilities. Politics is not always at the forefront of IHE research, whereas contemporary migration scholarship is more explicitly political. Second, this work exposes how migrant bodies are categorised and hierarchised according to, for instance, gender, race, language, and class and how this is achieved actively by state and other institutions. Third, we can see how embodied migrants are embedded in messy webs of care relations with others, with implications for their experiences of migration. Lastly, recent work on migration has tended to highlight temporality, elevating the importance of ‘temporary’mobilities. The perception that international students and academics are often temporary has, without doubt, made them appear somehow less significant within broader discussions of the implications of IHE. This, we argue, is a misunderstanding of their prominence. Disembodied IHE scholarship and its implications Over the past 20 years, intellectual interest in IHE has expanded in line with the speed in which universities are internationalising. Within contemporary HE, internationalisation has moved to the centre of universities’agendas. It involves countries and institutions and manifests in various (educational, human resource and immigration-related) policies, but rarely are bodies considered in relation to these, let alone prioritised. Intriguing are instances where the body is ostensibly evoked, but in reality is absent. In this next sub-section, we consider some examples of this. Concepts such as ‘brain drain’,‘brain gain’and ‘brain circulation’are used extensively within discussions of IHE: Knight (2012), for instance, makes widespread reference to the term ‘brain’. She describes ‘the great brain race of the twenty-first century’(p. 21) and proceeds to outline different ways in which the brain is relevant to this debate: ‘brain gain,brain drain,and brain train’ (p. 21). This notion of brain suggests an inherent corporeality. Knight (2012) writes: ‘The original goal of helping students from developing countries move to 6Progress in Human Geography 0(0) another country to complete a degree and return home is fading fast as nations compete to retain brain power’ (p. 28). Retaining brain power means, of course, retaining bodies; in this case, of students/graduates who become knowledge workers. And yet, the discussion makes no reference to bodies, and individuals are instead represented as disembodied brains; brain is a euphemism for knowledge or skills, but nothing more. There is no allusion to the ‘messy’body invoked by Longhurst (2004) which invokes a person’sfeelings and emotions as well as physiology (including ailments and illness, neurodiversity, injury, menstruation, pregnancy, menopause and so on). There is no discussion of the experiences or motivations of these brains, nor any consideration of how nation-states, for example, go about ‘retaining’brains (Knight, 2012). As described by M¨ ahlck (2013) in relation to Swedish higher education (HE): ‘the field of HE and research policy is […]often displayed as a war over the best brains,thereby presenting a representation of a disembodied researcher […]’(p. 72, emphasis added). The disembodied researcher is not simply an oversight but supports a particular neoliberal narrative within contemporary higher education that inevitably dehumanises the subject. This depiction of the movement of brains (gained, drained, circulated) evokes unexplored geographies. Who is ‘gaining’what, for example, and why? The nation-state is generally privileged within these discussions –brains are lost or gained by countries rather than communities, institutions or families. It replicates wider discussions around states’attempts to court capital through migration and the ‘ideology of the market’(Mitchell, 1993,2003). Individuals are important in so far as they are workers with brains or skills (Bauder, 2008). For Cheng (2015), this is a question of ‘biopolitics’and how states view and seek to exert control over their populations (through their bodies). Furthermore, and beyond the nationstate, brain drain/gain narratives serve to reinforce persistent understandings of the world as divided into the Global North and Global South, wherein countries located in the South lose their talent, through emigration, to countries in the North, which invariably gain in manifold ways (Vinokur, 2006). In a critique of the brain drain discourse, Rizvi (2005) argues for a postcolonial perspective on international student mobility, shedding light on student subjectivities and aspirations and more broadly on the cultural politics of identity, mobility, and globalisation. Yet, Rizvi does not deal with bodies in his analysis of students’narratives. This is surprising, given that identity is so often framed in relation to (racialised) bodies (Tolia-Kelly, 2010). Within the student accounts (Rizvi, 2005), some individuals mentioned family obligations (as a reason for returning home after study). The importance of family relations within brain circulation was thereby implied, but does not directly enter the analysis. Brain circulation has also been used by J¨ ons (2009), amongst others, to denote academics’circular mobility. J¨ ons’s work explores the long-term effects of academic mobility to Germany in the second half of the twentieth century and shows how this facilitated the country’s reintegration into an international research community after the Second World War. She also highlighted the gendered dimensions of academic mobilities (see also Leung, 2013). Whilst her scholarship represents a significant contribution to debates around academic mobility, gender remains a relatively disembodied (and categorical) concept. In summary, perspectives on IHE that take into account individuals’bodies are still relatively unusual and yet there are serious implications of neglecting corporeality in these discussions. The experiences of individuals for whom their gender, race, religion, ethnicity or health/(dis)ability and relationships with significant others are profoundly important are disregarded. Side-lining the messy diversity of bodies may also mean inadvertently ignoring discrimination and racial inequalities, limiting the abilities of institutions and states to devise and enact policies to counter this –in support of mobile students and academics. And, of course, such perspectives deny the full range of uncontainable human experiences that can emerge from the mobilities related to IHE. In what follows, we turn to discuss the importance of bodies within IHE directly. Geographies and bodies within IHE Now, we highlight instances where the body is either implied or discussed within scholarship on IHE, 1 Waters et al. 7 with a view both to initiating a conversation about the role of bodies and to drawing fruitful connections with wider research on geographies of embodiment. States and (un)wanted academic bodies Reflecting on the hierarchisation and categorisation of different migrants, Dixit (2021) discusses how visa regimes in the Global North control international academics’bodies. She uses her own experiences of rejection to highlight the racialised experiences of academics. Dixit considers how ‘the operations of the visa system reinforce existing hierarchies between the ‘safe’spaces of the Global North […]and the ‘unsafe’spaces of the Global South’(2021: 66). The experience of visa rejection, Dixit argues, can strongly reinforce feelings of non-belonging. She writes: ‘migration and borders are racialised,as bodies from the Global South are surveilled,categorised and,often,barred from entering Global North spaces’(p. 70). Different bodies are positioned differently with respect to one country or another when it comes to global mobility. The unpredictability of whether one’s body will be deemed ‘safe’ only serves to reinforce the feelings of extreme anxiety that scholars from the Global South often experience. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the tightening of visa controls across many countries in the Global North included restricting international student visas (Kell and Vogl, 2012). Later, in 2017, the ‘travel ban’announced by United States President Donald Trump, preventing immigration of individuals from a definitive list of (largely middle eastern and/or Muslim) countries had a direct impact upon international students’physical mobilities, with strong discriminatory undertones based on the embodied characteristics of skin colour and religion (Rose-Redwood and Rose-Redwood, 2017). Kalemba (2022) has made similar arguments about how the state (in this case, Australia) differentiates between potential international student bodies to admit the ‘right kind of migrants’(p. 573) and, conversely, to exclude the undesired. The use of biometrics in tracking and controlling staff and student mobility is also directly linked to nation-states’attempts to manage migrant bodies. Warren and Mavroudi (2011) provided an early account of the use of biometrics in the immigration experiences of international students and academics to the UK. They claimed that ‘BRPs [Biometric Residence Permits] can be seen as expanding the geographies of bodily surveillance’(p. 1498). In this case, biometric data included a digital photograph of the face and digital fingerprints. These observations relate directly to a broader conversation about the use of biometrics in immigration and border control (e.g. Amoore, 2006;Hyndman and Mountz, 2020). Language testing is one of the key instruments used by states to regulate migration, when ‘country of origin’is no longer deemed an acceptable reason for exclusion (Shohamy, 2017). A notorious, historical example of language testing in migration regulation is the Australian Dictation Test, designed to implement the White Australia Policy at the turn of the 20th Century (McNamara, 2009). The language and content of a 50-word dictation test was manipulated to reflect racist views around whether a migrant was wanted or unwanted. Undesired migrants were intentionally presented with language or content they were unlikely to know (e.g. an unwanted Czech Jewish applicant fluent in several European languages was tested in Scottish Gaelic), thus preventing their subsequent entry (McNamara, 2005). In the United States, language criteria were explicitly added to immigration legislation in the 1906 Act; citizenship applicants were required to ‘sign their petitions in their own handwriting and speak English’(Kunnan, 2009: 39). The requirement to read and write had already appeared in the previous Act from 1893, but without specifying the language. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were several attempts to require reading and writing skills as a way of preventing the entry of ‘undesirable immigrants’(cited by Kunnan, 2009: 40; Immigration Restriction League, 1915). Reading and knowledge tests based on language, such as those on the US Constitution, were often designed to restrict certain racialised groups of people (such as eastern Europeans or Asians), frequently successfully (Kunnan, 2009). These longstanding ideas have continued and spread and are used to categorise and control the bodies of international students and academics today. 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