“Non-Traditional” Educational Mobilities: Patterns, Discourses, and Transformative Possibilities

Within the context of youth mobility in the twenty-first century, this chapter features emergent forms of international student mobilities (ISM), labeled “non-traditional” (NT), a term that indexes their seemingly new character but also provides scope to unpack the way in which hierarchies in knowledge production and higher education come to shape and reproduce the still uneven geographies of ISM. As outlined in this chapter, the diversification in ISM is evidenced not only by geographical patterns and social composition of students but also by the changing ideological and aspirational landscapes of international education. Divided into three main sections, this chapter proceeds firstly by accounting for the shifting patterns in ISM as well as the geographies that they reflect: transperipheral – specifically, regional and intercontinental – reverse and transnational. Subsequently, the discourses that frame NT ISM are discussed, focusing on the ways by which the valuing of different forms of ISM and higher education more broadly reflect wider global sociopolitical structures and colonial histories and presents. The chapter ends by highlighting the potential for further explorations of the transformative possibilities of ISM beyond its “traditional geography,” signaling implications for the “decentring” of ISM epistemologies.