Immobility infrastructures: taking online courses and staying put amongst Chinese international students during the COVID-19

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper draws attention to the current and possible effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the (im)mobility trajectories of international students (IS) and the global higher education landscape. From the perspective of migration infrastructure, this paper specifically focuses on the immobility experiences amongst Chinese international students (CIS) who planned to enrol overseas in 2020 but instead chose to take online courses in China due to the COVID-19. It asks how online courses are both facilitated and constrained by a set of institutional and technological infrastructural forces. Particularly it also explores how some CIS exercise agency to mobilise their infrastructural surroundings and overcome certain infrastructural deficiencies they encounter, with the aim of improving studying/living quality while inhabiting immobilities in a transnational context. As such, this paper challenges the oppositional nature of mobility and immobility, arguing that immobility is not the ‘flip side’ to mobility or an outcome by default, and that being immobile can be affirming and empowering. Essentially, the paper brings this infrastructurally sensitive theoretical approach into international student mobility (ISM) studies, shifting the focus from examining how infrastructures move people to how they enable people to stay, and to how they are lived and reconstructed at an everyday level.