The Institutionalised Othering of International Students: Decentring and rethinking

The origins of this chapter is a critical institutional ethnography that took place at an arts university in Britain. The chapter begins with a critical contextualisation of the global Higher Education context in order to place the ‘Reimagining Conversations’ project and its focus on international students within it. The main proposition is that the focus on international students was perceived as disruptive within a UK Higher Education sector located within a global context and at a certain political moment in Britain, irrespective of project outcomes. The chapter is not a straight forward report on findings but instead a critical exploration into what an institutionally-conceived research project reveals about the othering of international students. There is evidence that the experiences of Chinese students are bound up in complex institutional discourses. The project that found international students, with a specific focus on Chinese students, were subject to institutionalised othering through their positioning within UK Higher Education policy, institutional practices, teachers and other students. International student recruitment is often framed as less desirable than the inclusion of minoritised home students and, in this case, can result in exclusion from the narratives of success and prestige attached to the arts.