Watch recording here:

https://youtu.be/UTPN9ko1q1U

Speakers:

Beatriz Padilla (University of South Florida - USA)

Glenda Vaillant Cruz (University of South Florida - USA)

Joel Ramirez (University of South Florida - USA)

Alphonse Opoku (University of South Florida)

Shuvechha Ghimire Sharma (University of South Florida)

Raquel Matias (ISCTE-IUL / CIES - Lisbon - Portugal)

Chair: Lucia Stavig, (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill)

 

Description:

With globalization reaching Higher Education Institutions (HES), asymmetries and the circulation of talent have become widespread (Finlay et al 2012), contributing to reinforcing neo-colonial relations and/or coloniality. One key component of the internationalization of higher education around the world is to recruit and graduate international students, however once they arrive to their hosting institutions, they are not treaty equally. International students are a very diverse pool of people, yet this diversity is not recognized. In fact, their culture and language tend to be downplayed and are expected to assimilate to become the future representatives of the country/institutions they studied at. This panel brings together research that involves international (or minority) students from the Global South who have chosen to study in the Global North, discussing from their own perspectives and experiences how they cope with becoming an international student (or minority/underrepresented student, their process of homemaking, the process of ethnicization or racialization experience, etc.

Vaillant Cruz, Ramirez and Padilla presentation is about the underrepresentation of Latinx@/x and Latin American in Universities in the United States —they face a multiplicity of barriers based on their socioeconomic, linguistic, and migratory statuses. This ethnographic study takes qualitative data from semi-structured interviews to contextualize their varied experiences of Latinx and Latin American college students. The narratives collected through these ethnographic interviews give insight into the experiences of Latinx and Latin American college students and how they navigate post-secondary spaces at HES, assessing problem areas. Alphonse Opoku presents on the homemaking process of African international students in the United States and their agentic practices of integration, based on data collected through semi-structured interviews with international students from African countries and conducting content analysis of the blogs built for international students, comparing and contrasting this set of data. Along similar lines, Shuvechha Ghimire Sharma brings the case of Indian international students in Germany, focusing on their home-making process, uncovering the negotiation of multiple attachments of being and belonging, navigating between the “imagined” and “lived” experiences of space creating. Raquel Matias discusses the case of African students from the former Portuguese colonies studying in Portugal, their experiences of inclusion and exclusion including language discrimination.

References:

Findlay, A. M., King, R., Smith, F. M., Geddes, A., & Skeldon, R. (2012). World class? An investigation of globalisation, difference and international student mobility. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37(1), 118-131.

About:

Beatriz Padilla, works at the University of South Florida (USF). She has a Ph.D. and Masters in Sociology (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Masters in Public Affairs (University of Texas, Austin, United States), and a BA in Political Sciences and Public Administration (National University of Cuyo, Argentina). Currently, she the Interim Director of the Institute for the Study of Latin American and the Caribbean at USFs and an associated researcher at Instituto Universitario de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL). She was Principal Investigator at ISCTE-IUL (2016-2018), Heath Visiting Professor at Grinnell College (2018) and Associate Professor at University of Minho (2013-2015). She has been a consultant for the International Organization of Migrations (IOM) in several occasions and for the Portuguese Presidency of the Council of the European Union in 2007. Her lines of research are migration, diversity, gender, health, inequalities and public policies.

Glenda Vaillant Cruz is a MA student in the Master of Latin American and the Caribbean Studies and Applied Anthropology at the University of South Florida, currently working in the project “Latin American and Latinx: mapping ethnic and racial experience in Higher Education”. She graduated in Anthropology from the University of Central Florida, and is a Graduate Assistant in the Institute of Latin American and the Caribbean.

Joel Ramirez is MA students in the Master of Latin American and the Caribbean Studies at the University of South Florida, currently working in the project “Latin American and Latinx: mapping ethnic and racial experience in Higher Education”. He graduated in Political Sciences  Emory University and is a Graduate Assistant in the Institute of Latin American and the Caribbean.

Alphonse Opoku is a finishing a MA in Sociology at the University of South Florida, and has a BA in Sociology from the University of Ghana. His main research interests are social inequalities, power and social norms. He is a Teaching Assistant in the Sociology Department of the University of South Florida.

Shuvechha Ghimire Sharma is a PhD student in the Sociology Department of the University of South Florida, has a MA in Sociology from the University of Bielefeld, Germany, and MA in Sociology from the Jawaharlal Nehru University in India and a BA in Sociology from the Jesus and Mary College in Delhi University, India. She was a Visiting Lecturer at Kathmandu University School of Arts and Kathmandu College of Management.

Raquel Matias holds a PhD in Sociology at ISCTE-IUL (Lisbon) and the National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED, Paris), with the thesis "Self-reported bilingual outcomes and language acculturation among descendants of Turkish immigrants in France, Germany and the Netherlands". Since 2003, she has been conducting research on the intersection between sociology of international migration and sociology of language, focusing on immigrants and their descendants in Europe and in Portugal, comparing policies on immigration, social and linguistic integration, and more recently on bilingual and linguistic educational programs, and language policies at several scales: institutional, family and individual levels. She is an Invited Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology (ESPP, ISTE-IUL), teaching the course Linguistic Diversity in Contemporary and a Researcher at the Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (CIES-IUL/ ISCTE-IUL) studying language attitudes, practices and policies.

Lucia Stavig is a Doctoral Candidate in Anthropology, a P.E.O Scholar, and Royster Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received a Master’s in Anthropology from the University of Lethbridge, Canada in 2017, a Master’s in Justice and Social Inquiry from Arizona State University in 2013, and a Bachelor of Arts from New College of Florida in 2010. Her dissertation entitled "Mosoq Pakari Sumaq Kawsay/A New Day for Good Living: Healing Body and Community in the Andes," documents Indigenous women's efforts to treat illnesses related to their forced sterilization in the 1990s using natural and ancestral medicine and spiritual ceremony. Her research includes migrations, indigenous women and movements, gender and forced sterilization in the Andes.