As part of my reflection on this course, I have collated emails/articles/docs that speak to the bordering and policing of international students at UK universities. One of the things that struck me the most about the course was how our insistence on not taking attendance was a contentious decision. Thinking of this in relation to my group’s project on education and critical pedagogy, I wonder then how classrooms are inevitably functioning within a self/other (citizen/foreigner) paradigm without most students even knowing, and how this subsequently affects what is being taught and how it is being taught As such, going forward, I am keen to think about these questions within the education/critical pedagogy group, as well as within the larger class group.
These are really important questions–and very subtle, in a way, as quite invisible. I thought it was interesting that few of you were aware that attendance monitoring was brought in as part of the university’s effort to comply with visa rules.
International staff on work visas are also subject to discriminatory monitoring of their whereabouts–and in recent years, our university instituted a system for monitoring all academic staff’s whereabouts in a form of ‘equal opportunity surveillance’. See this recent story about how they are doing this in Birmingham: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/jan/18/birmingham-university-in-row-over-racist-treatment-of-non-eu-staff
Another aspect is the so-called ‘Prevent’ strategy, which makes staff of public institutions (including universities), responsible for monitoring the thought and speech of students to detect ‘extremism’ and prevent them being ‘radicalized’. Quite a lot has been written on that.
So what can we learn from this? Some scholars have been thinking about how borders enter into our everyday interactions, rather than just being something ‘out there’. Nira Yuval-Davis and others have made a film about this: https://www.uel.ac.uk/News/2015/05/Everyday-Borders?_ga=2.112663372.933610269.1547907746-2085100522.1547907746
Look forward to more analysis on these issues!