International or international(-ised) students? Insights from continental Europe

We were very pleased to curate this special issue on constructions of international students across Europe. We called for papers focusing on continental Europe, as whilst there now exists quite a large body of literature on representations of international students in countries such as the US, the UK, and Australia (e.g. Lee & Rice, 2007; Walker, 2014; Zhang & Tu, 2019), we wanted to expand this literature by focusing on international students in continental Europe. We considered this important, as an attempt to destablilise the dominance of English-majority speaking destinations in shaping thinking and scholarship, as well as unpack different political dynamics and tensions emerging in relation to international students. This is the first contribution of our special issue; the second revolves around a definition of internationalisation and the ‘international student’, and the uses of these definitions. There is in general a rapid expansion in literature on internationalisation, but much of it focuses on ‘international student experiences’ – weakly and broadly conceptualised (Deuchar, 2022). There is, however, much less critical investigation of the structural influences of policy, practices, and representations in constructing the international student and shaping their experiences (Lipura & Collins, 2020). The papers in this special issue, therefore, engage more directly with these influences, and suggests that the concept of ‘internationalised’, rather than ‘international’ students may be a more appropriate one. This enables the examination of internationalisation as a process that creates ‘internationalised’ experiences (in the same sense as students’ experiences can be racialised, classed, and gendered). Understood in this sense, we point to how students described by the authors in this special issue are internationalised into specific experiences