International Student Mobility and Temporal Stability

Abstract

International student mobility has gained significant attention in higher education research. Most studies focus on migration outcomes and aspirations, while other studies start to recognize the open-ended nature of students’ futures, particularly when faced with uncertainty. This study rethinks international student mobility through future imaginaries. Drawing on narrative interviews with four postgraduate Chinese international students from one university in the UK, this article presents students’ meaning-making about their imagined futures in response to the uncertainties and changing policies. Within these four participants’ narratives, the findings demonstrate that students were less concerned with mobility itself and more concerned with achieving a stable and predictable future trajectory. This article conceptualizes such a future orientation as temporal stability to capture the phenomenon that students were not simply concerned about future aspirations as their stories involved issues of predictivity, planning, continuity and future direction. When students start to only pursue temporal stability, this article calls for future research into what other futures students no longer imagine and why.