Emergent geographies of international education and social exclusion

This paper explores the socio-spatial implications of recent developments in the intemationalisation of education, which includes the growth in numbers of foreign students and the establishment of offshore schools. It demonstrates the relationship between emergent geographies of international education in the "West" and social reproduction in both student "sending" and "receiving" societies. Drawing on fieldwork in Hong Kong and Canada, it argues that international education is transforming the spatial scales over which social reproduction is achieved: on the one hand, upper-middle-class populations in East Asia are able to secure their social status through the acquisition of a "Western education", thereby creating new geographies of social exclusion within "student-sending" societies. On the other hand, primary and secondary schools in Canada are able to harness the benefits of internationalisation in order to offset the negative effects of neoliberal educational reform, thereby facilitating local social reproduction.