Student Mobilities

There has been for the last decade, in the tenor of general scholarship, much enthusiastic talk about the 'mobilities turn' in the social sciences, and of borders made porous by mass communication and the various patterns of migration and circuits of mobility. International foreign 'students' form one vector amongst the multiple trajectories of migratory movement, and represent foreign 'bodies', who (choose to) become mobile in search of educational opportunities. Such movement renders them 'international', and in some instances cosmopolitan. Many remain however, rooted to their home spaces through their use and choice of communication through their home languages; and further use their home language to satisfy a sense of belonging in a foreign host space. Language (and communication) is thus considered key in unpacking notions of belonging. This exploratory paper employs an interpretivist lens and works through a sample of narratives of a small group...

At the dusk of the twentieth and the dawn of the twenty-first centuries transnational mobility is increasingly becoming an important space through which many of our human activities are defined. Virtually all aspects of our modern world–our jobs, culture, educational systems, ideologies, identities and even our relationships with one another are highly negotiated and inadvertently transformed by the profound forces of mobility. Through indepth interviews conducted with transnational academics of African origin in the Faculty of Humanities, Development and Social Sciences (FHDSS) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) this paper posits to critically provide an understanding on the role that transnational mobility has played in challenging the current thinking of foreign African academics pertaining to the issue of African scholarship. Given that UKZN is branded the ‘Premier University of African Scholarship’ the paper demonstrates how foreign African migrants are taking advantage ...

The articles in this issue of Alternation reveal how fine grained and nuanced research in the area of migration and transnationalism has become. They direct our gaze to scholarship that pays critical attention to both deep theory and rich ethnography. They also attempt to capture the transnationalised lives and mobile experiences of the research participants. Even the most cursory glance reveals that the contemporary global condition is anything but inertial, and produces different articulations of transnational involvements. As the participants involved in the various studies reveal, lives are lived across borders marked by nation state boundaries. The nation state's borders have also become porous and lives are lived 'mobile' and transnationally. This heightened and changing nature of movements, flows, and travels through permeable borders and boundaries positions us in various contexts, and to various degrees, as mobile, global subjects. Likewise, numerous new theorie...

There has been for the last decade, in the tenor of general scholarship, much enthusiastic talk about the 'mobilities turn' in the social sciences, and of borders made porous by mass communication and the various patterns of migration and circuits of mobility. International foreign 'students' form one vector amongst the multiple trajectories of migratory movement, and represent foreign 'bodies', who (choose to) become mobile in search of educational opportunities. Such movement renders them 'international', and in some instances cosmopolitan. Many remain however, rooted to their home spaces through their use and choice of communication through their home languages; and further use their home language to satisfy a sense of belonging in a foreign host space. Language (and communication) is thus considered key in unpacking notions of belonging. This exploratory paper employs an interpretivist lens and works through a sample of narratives of a small group...

At the dusk of the twentieth and the dawn of the twenty-first centuries transnational mobility is increasingly becoming an important space through which many of our human activities are defined. Virtually all aspects of our modern world–our jobs, culture, educational systems, ideologies, identities and even our relationships with one another are highly negotiated and inadvertently transformed by the profound forces of mobility. Through indepth interviews conducted with transnational academics of African origin in the Faculty of Humanities, Development and Social Sciences (FHDSS) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) this paper posits to critically provide an understanding on the role that transnational mobility has played in challenging the current thinking of foreign African academics pertaining to the issue of African scholarship. Given that UKZN is branded the ‘Premier University of African Scholarship’ the paper demonstrates how foreign African migrants are taking advantage ...

ABSTRACT : There has been for the last decade, in the tenor of general scholarship, much enthusiastic talk about
the ‘mobilities turn’ in the social sciences, and of borders made porous by mass communication and the various
patterns of migration and circuits of mobility. International foreign ‘students’ form one vector amongst the
multiple trajectories of migratory movement, and represent foreign ‘bodies’, who (choose to) become mobile in
search of educational opportunities. Such movement renders them ‘international’, and in some instances
cosmopolitan. Many remain however, rooted to their home spaces through their use and choice of communication
through their home languages; and further use their home language to satisfy a sense of belonging in a foreign host
space. Language (and communication) is thus considered key in unpacking notions of belonging. This exploratory
paper employs an interpretivist lens and works through a sample of narratives of a small group of foreign African
students and unpacks how language(s) and communication are used by the students in a way that ‘speaks’ to a sense
of self and belonging.

This paper examines legislation concerning language policy and language choice in the United Kingdom and South Africa. In particular an account of the pressures and imperatives to which such policy development must respond is provided. The paper suggests that the comparison between

The contemporary global condition is one of heightened movement that positions us in various contexts, in varying degree, as mobile, global subjects; as migrants, as tourists, and as transnational workers. While transnationalism, migrancy, diaspora and mobilities have become buzz words in the social sciences with an explosion of work in the fields of transnational and diaspora studies, and the several issues of transnational and diasporic identities and nationstate, migrant labour, remittances etc., there has been substantially less work done in the field of transnationalised religion. And while the religious identities of the various diasporic communities has received ethnographic and theoretical scrutiny, this has been less the case for itinerant transnationals seen to commute across increasingly porous borders, weaving back and forth between geographic and cultural spaces for the purposes of work.