“Wow. What's going on?” Emotional geographies of international student mobility to the UK in a time of crisis

Abstract

Despite attempts to shed light on the precarity and resilience of international students, there has been thus far little engagement with the emotional dynamics of their lived experiences in times of crisis and the implications of these for the geographies of international student mobility. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 13 international (i.e., non-UK) doctoral students in a UK university during the COVID-19 pandemic, we examine how emotions are attached to different places and spaces, and how they are mobilised in various ways as students navigate uncertainties. Building on Kenway and Fahey's concept of ‘emoscapes’, we demonstrate that central to the (im)mobility of international students are emotions produced in and constitutive of particular spaces and in relation to various scales. We showcase the significance of the material and embodied dimensions of learning in the emotional life of internationally mobile students, which informs how the well-being of these students should be and could be supported at policy and practice levels. By illustrating the way in which emotional geographies are produced in pandemic times, we consider whether the emotional dynamics of international students in a time of crisis have the potential to both reconfigure and reproduce the uneven geographies of international student mobility.