Between striated and smooth space: Exploring the topology of transnational student mobility

Abstract

In this paper, we raise a question regarding how transnational students develop their spaces as mobile, temporary, and at times stable and territorially fixed. We argue that approaching transnational student migration and its relations to place as a Deleuzian assemblage is a fruitful way of highlighting this issue, and we propose the axes of the expressive/material and territorialisation/de-territorialisation as analytical tools for understanding aspects of the temporal and spatial dimensions of transnational student mobility. Our theoretical discussion is informed by the migration experiences of transnational students studying at a Norwegian university. Our core argument is that transnational student mobility should be approached as a complex process in which links to places in the student’s past, present and future dissolve the linear notion of causality and in which new notions of the relations between proximity and distance challenge ideas regarding the power relations embedded in a geometrical space.