scholarly journals ‘There was no freedom to leave’: Global South international students in Portugal during the COVID-19 Pandemic

2021 ◽  
pp. 147821032110254
Author(s):  
Daniel Malet Calvo ◽  
David Cairns ◽  
Thais França ◽  
Leonardo Francisco de Azevedo

This article looks at the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on international students, focusing on Portuguese-speaking African and Brazilian students during the lockdown of spring 2020. Using evidence from interviews conducted with 27 students domiciled in Portugal, we illustrate some of the challenges faced by students when coping with the pandemic, including difficulties in meeting the cost of tertiary education and the centrality of working to sustain their stays abroad, alongside the emotional impact of prolonged domestic confinement and separation from families. We also consider the paradoxes of online teaching, which have made visible the digital gap between local and international Global South students in the context of their stays. In this sense, pre-existing inequalities are more at the centre of students’ concerns than new issues raised by COVID-19, a pandemic that served to reveal former injustice in the context of global capitalism. In our conclusion, we argue that there is a need for greater recognition of the vulnerabilities facing certain African and Brazilian students at Global North universities in the context of contemporary neo-liberalism, including their dependence upon precarious work. Policy responses include the need for a more serious involvement and responsibility by both home and host higher education institutions in the lives of their students abroad.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Logan Page

<p>Tertiary education, once a purely domestic affair, has become an increasingly globalised industry over previous decades. Whilst the international sector has grown to being New Zealand's fourth largest export market (Ministry of Education, 2016), there is a lack of credible research on the demand of international students.    This thesis aims to provide a greater understanding of the determinants of international student demand, both in New Zealand and internationally. I firstly provide a descriptive analysis of the trends in the international student market for New Zealand and 27 OECD countries. Secondly, I use a fixed-effects approach to analyse the demand of international students within New Zealand, using fees data at the course-by-university level. Thirdly, I then generalise this approach to the international market to provide an analysis of the demand for international students travelling to the OECD.    The findings from these analyses imply that the demand for international university education is relatively inelastic. The impact of a marginal increase in fees decreases the number of EFTS/students at a proportion of less than one. Furthermore, this effect is generally not statistically distinguishable from zero.</p>


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 152-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Traxler

This article addresses the need to build sustainable, appropriate and authentic foundations for learning with mobiles in the Global South. It does this in two ways: first, by reviewing aspects of the current environment, namely the nature of learning with mobiles in the Global North, the relationships between research and policy in relation to learning with mobiles, the impact of mobile technology on language, and the meanings of international development; and second, by consolidating these within a broader and critical historical framework that sees education and technology as the instruments of the hegemony of the Global North, reinforcing its values and worldview. This is, however, methodologically challenging and problematic, and the article briefly considers how such arguments should be constructed. The article concludes by offering ways forward as the basis for practical progress.


Ethnicities ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 146879682110370
Author(s):  
Giulia Marchetti ◽  
Loretta Baldassar ◽  
Anita Harris ◽  
Shanthi Robertson

This article seeks to advance our understanding of contemporary transnational youth mobility, drawing on the concept ‘mobile transitions’ to explore scholarly approaches to the mobility practices of young Italians moving abroad. We present a critical literature review of the intersections of migration, youth and transition studies to argue that the literature on youth transnational mobility currently features two contrasting models comprising a ‘transitions-focused’ Global South model and an ‘experiential-focused’ Global North model. This bifurcation fails to account for emergent regional models of mobility that may help to sharpen scholarly understandings of a new generation of youth ‘on the move’. We propose an alternative model positioned somewhere along the spectrum between the Global North and Global South models, which we define as the Mediterranean model of ‘family-centred’ transnational youth mobility. This model reflects aspects of both privileged, experiential youth migrations, which tend to undervalue the impact on transitions to adulthood, and economically driven youth migrations, which tend to focus more directly on the economic dimensions of youth to adulthood transitions. The Mediterranean model highlights more broadly how mobility enables and shapes transitions, which are simultaneously driven by both economic imperatives and individual experiential desires, and mediated through family and culture.


Author(s):  
Arturo Arriagada ◽  
Mark Graham ◽  
Ursula Huws ◽  
Janaki Srinivasan ◽  
Macarena Bonhomme ◽  
...  

This panel brings together scholars whose work seeks to tame platform capitalism understanding how the lives of platform workers are affected by digital platforms. Research on platform labor has been mostly done in the global north, as well as in relation to global platforms like Uber or Amazon (Rosenblat 2019; Scholz 2016). Thus, the panelists, moreover, explore how the lives of platform workers can be improved within the global platform economy by analyzing workers’ subjectivities in relation to platforms and the impact of technologies in job quality. To achieve this, this panel brings together scholars from global north and south countries that will map the complexities and subjectivities of platform workers in order to tame platform capitalism. We present a set of articles that address: (1) regulatory resistance that clarifies and redefines the rules that platforms need to abide by; (2) bottom-up resistance of platform workers who seek to organize, subvert, and build alternatives; (3) the ways that action research can support either of those initiatives to ultimately tame some of the worst excesses of platform capitalism.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-295
Author(s):  
Matthew Mahutga

I review three key claims regarding the impact of production globalization on manufacturing workers worldwide, and subject them to empirical scrutiny. Some argue that production globalization causes a “race to the bottom” that leads to a downward convergence of manufacturing workers’ labor power worldwide. Others suggest instead that production globalization leads to an upward convergence of labor power among manufacturing workers worldwide. A third perspective is agnostic with respect to the average level of this labor power, but predicts divergence between the global North and global South. Using a novel empirical approach to cross-national and temporally comparable measurement of manufacturing labor market power, I show that both the (country-average) level and (between-country) dispersion of labor market power have increased worldwide since the mid-1960s. To explain these trends, I juxtapose insights from Heckscher-Ohlin trade theory with those from the interdisciplinary literature on global value chains and production networks. Both predict that globalization should increase labor market power more in the global North than in the global South. However, the former focuses on labor demand shocks from international trade, while the latter focuses on relationships between firms in the North and South in light of the strategic behavior of network/chain leaders. Augmenting the empirical approach to the measurement of the aggregate positional power of national manufacturing firms developed elsewhere, I show that both international trade and positional power matter for the distribution of manufacturing labor-market power worldwide, but the latter effects are stronger. I conclude by positioning these results within larger debates about the fate of labor in a globalized manufacturing economy.


Author(s):  
Sarah Robertson

This chapter charts the long history of travel writing about the US South and explores the continued fascination and simultaneous repulsion with its poor whites. It discusses neo-colonial approaches to the region and poverty in the work of writers including Pamela Petro, V.S. Naipaul, and Paul Theroux, and the cosmopolitan perspectives advanced by writers such as Bill Bryson and Eddy L. Harris. It compares representations of Atlanta as the embodiment of the New South with romanticized accounts of rural poverty and proposes that the realities of contemporary poverty either go unrecognized or are aligned with the economics of the Global South rather than with US economics that shape the Global North. It critically examines stereotyping, appeals to authenticity and questions the impact of tourism on the region.


AJIL Unbound ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 114 ◽  
pp. 40-44
Author(s):  
César Rodríguez-Garavito

After twenty-five years of climate litigation dominated by cases in the United States, Australia, and other jurisdictions in the Global North, a second wave of lawsuits arose in the mid-2010s that prominently feature cases filed in countries of the Global South. I argue that the use of human rights norms and strategies characterizes the “Global South route” to climate litigation, one that is firmly rooted in the trajectory of human rights adjudication and litigation in key Southern countries over the last three decades. I posit that, in order to understand the present and the future of this route, it is essential to (1) track its origins and features to the trajectory of “Global South constitutionalism” over the last three decades, especially litigation around socioeconomic rights, and (2) unpack the category of “Global South” countries, in order to avoid overgeneralizations and to identify the types of countries that are likely to see most climate litigation and court decisions. I close by suggesting that, in light of the planetary and urgent nature of the climate challenge, future research and advocacy should explore transnational forms of litigation that cut across the North-South divide and pay systematic attention to the impact of climate litigation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (46) ◽  
pp. 85-102
Author(s):  
James J. Gregory ◽  
Jayne M. Rogerson

AbstractResearch concerning studentification is growing in importance. The supply of private student accommodation forms part of the wider urban process of studentification which documents changes in the social, economic and cultural fabric of cities. Although scholarly interest concerning the supply of private student accommodation has enjoyed sustained interest in the global North, only limited work is available surrounding the supply and demand for private student accommodation in global South urban centres. In South Africa there has been growing recognition of the impact of the studentification that has accompanied the massification of tertiary education in the post-apartheid period. Using interviews with key stakeholders, suppliers of student accommodation, as well as focus groups with students, this paper explores the supply of houses in multiple occupation and students’ perspectives on such properties in Johannesburg, South Africa. One distinctive influence upon the studentification process in South Africa is the impact of the national government funding system which was restructured in order to support the tertiary education of students from previously disadvantaged communities.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-79
Author(s):  
Louise Kaktiņš Ms ◽  

New educational models such as those involving a third party educational provider linked with an official university for purposes of providing a bridge (a pathway program) into a mainstream university degree, particularly for international students, have become part of the higher education landscape capitalising on the international demand for tertiary qualifications from Australia and other English-language-based universities. The perceptions of teachers employed in one such pathway program are the focus of this current paper – a research area that to date has been understudied. Such data are of great value in furnishing an in-depth view of the challenges involved in an educational model that is highly commercialised and the impacts it has on teaching and learning, especially on academic identity in terms of the specific key relationships – between teachers and third party provider, between teachers and partner university, between teachers and international students. Some of the more concerning issues revolve around the extent to which market imperatives impinge on pedagogical concerns, on teachers’ professional commitment to their vocation, on international students’ capacity to acquire an authentic tertiary education that supports rather than detracts their transition to mainstream university, and on whether such educational models can be genuinely sustainable long term.


2020 ◽  
pp. 095001702094244
Author(s):  
Pelin Demirel ◽  
Ekaterina Nemkova ◽  
Rebecca Taylor

Millions of freelancers work on digital platforms in the online labour market (OLM). The OLM’s capacity to both undermine and reproduce labour inequalities is a theme in contemporary platform economy debates. What is less well understood is how processes of social (re)production take place in practice for diverse freelancers on global platforms. Drawing on a study of freelance designers, we use Bourdieu’s notions of capital and field to explore the specific ‘rules of the game’ and the symbolic valuing of skills and identities that secure legitimacy and advantage in the OLM. We contribute to contemporary debates by illuminating the power of Global North actors to shape freelancer positions and hierarchies in the online design field. The ‘cost advantages’ of Global South workers are counterbalanced by the symbolic legitimising of specific cultural and social practices (specifically in relation to language) and the devaluing of others.


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