University of California, Davis

Graduate Student, Cultural Studies

PhD Candidate, UC President's Dissertation Fellow, Associate Instructor, Graduate Student Assisant to the Dean and to the Chancellor

Thesis Title: "Prospective Student, Potential Threat: The Figure of the International Student in US Higher Education"

About

I am a PhD candidate in cultural studies writing a dissertation on how the figure of the international student fits within the shift from liberal to neoliberal modes of organizing U.S. higher education on a national and global scale. My work is informed by queer transnational feminist cultural studies and I am particularly interested in Foucauldian/Deleuzian analyses of societies of control.


My dissertation provides a critical genealogy of the recruitment, regulation, and education of international students in the U.S. I examine the ways universities function as a technology for the development and dissemination of American neoliberalism. Figurations of the international student as both model minority and potential threat provide concrete examples for understanding the shifting economic and cultural politics of racial and religious formations, gender and sexual identity, class structures, and hierarchies of dis/ability that undergird the ostensibly objective logics of neoliberalism emerging from and shaping US higher education. After the discovery that several participants in the September 11, 2001 attacks had entered the country using student visas, the US government enacted strict new visa regulations further entrenching the normative Western standards of properly rational and future-oriented personhood that have historically coded the racism, heterosexism, and ableism of U.S. immigration policy. In 2003, however, a minor decrease in the issuance of student visas provoked panic among government officials, university administrators, and corporate executives who recognized the vital importance of international students to higher education and national interests more broadly. While the frenzied response suggests that the need for international students in the U.S., and particularly students from countries designated as Asian, South Asian, and Middle Eastern, is a recent phenomenon, I locate the contemporary moment in a longer history of international education and U.S. foreign policy. This project offers original insight into the pivotal role of international students in shaping U.S. policies and perceptions regarding identity, economics, education, and personhood.