At the heart of student migration education, mobility, and the time space production of everyday life

... spatial patterns and temporal rhythms of intimate relationships 23 2.3.4 The Social (Re )production of Everyday Life In centering students at the heart of the everyday, quotidian, and transnational... variety of spaces and times participate in the making, routinizing, and/ or disrupting of these elements Building on the perspective of space and ‘place’ in examining the geographies of student migration, ... actions and narratives But it is also, as they argue, exactly the attendance to negotiation and coordination of everyday life across multiple time- spaces that will expose the asymmetry of power relations

1.1 A Provocation for Research

Something in the world forces us to think This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter…

(Deleuze, 1968: 139)

Year 2010 I made a new friend, and I identify him as Andy (a pseudonym)… I

met Andy at a friend’s gathering He was at a corner all by himself, fiddling with his mobile phone I teased my friend for being a ‘poor’ host and guided his attention to Andy My friend knew that I had prior research experiences with Singaporean-Vietnamese international marriages and ‘shoved’ me towards Andy, “He’s

Vietnamese Help me entertain him please!”

Encountering a Student Migrant… Andy was a 21 year-old Vietnamese who

came to Singapore in 2007 to study at a private university He told me that he was finishing up his study and had to return to Vietnam, yet he was unhappy about it I recall his explanation to be a complex mixture of pragmatic and emotional logics He felt that he would earn more money and lead a better life here in Singapore In addition, he had forged new friendships in Singapore that he could not bear to part with Andy likened this to, in his words as I remember, having to “start all over again” and re-adapt himself to the lifestyle and environment of Vietnam But at the same time, he also looked forward to seeing his family and friends back in Ho Chi Minh City

A week before Andy’s departure… I had exchanged Facebook contact with

Andy in order to stay in touch with him and later discovered that we lived in the same precinct A week before Andy was due to leave Singapore, he asked me out for coffee Andy was feeling ambivalent about returning home When I asked him what his plans were, he told me that he would not discount the possibility of coming back

steadfast in his belief that he would return to Singapore soon Andy asked me the same question I explained to him that I would begin my graduate study by research

in August 2010…

1.2 Stories of Student Migration from Singapore

The encounter with Andy has provoked me to wonder about the intimate worlds of international students who leave their homes to study in Singapore Andy’s narrative opened up a series of questions surrounding the logics of their migratory journeys, youthful aspirations, and the social connections they maintain and forge in

host communities At the Heart of Student Migration builds on this one encounter It

is about young Southeast Asian overseas students at the heart of the everyday, quotidian, and transnational geographies of education migration By mobilizing a range of critical perspectives on young people, education, and migration, I assemble stories about these student migrants’ class-travelling aspirations, changing positions and identifications with the self and others, as well as the variegated forms of social ties that connect them to people and places afar Central to this thesis is a concern with the everyday processes and practices involved in socially reproducing young people’s cross-border lives At the same time, social reproduction is taken to be a complex iterative process that operates through both spatial and temporal organization

As Kell and Vogl (2010) observed, global student mobility has gained significance in the wake of contemporary cross-border flows and globalization Previous studies on the geographies of student mobility have often placed emphasis

on student migration from the ‘East’ to the ‘West’ Yet, the global mobility of students in the last decade has become more multi-directional and disturbs the

simplistic classification of an East-West trajectory of student migration Indeed, East Asian cities such as Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore are actively promoting themselves as ‘education hubs’ This research focuses on the intra-regional stories of international student migration by attending to the voices of Southeast Asian students who pursue higher education in Singapore In recent years, we have witnessed a change in how Singapore’s education landscape is increasingly made up

of a more diverse student population As revealed by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (2011) in the National Day Rally address, international students account for 18% of the student body in local universities This significant proportion of international students is perceived to be paramount to building Singapore’s reputation

as a world-class education hub on the one hand, and as a vehicle in fueling the state’s knowledge economy

city-At the same time, the growing number of international students in Singapore

is also sparking debates over whether Singaporean young people are pushed place in the face of competition from foreigners This has led to resentment over the perceived preferential treatment towards ‘foreigners’ In order to appease the ‘nation’,

of post-independence Singapore government, the Minister of Education announced that a ‘cap’ has been put in place to bring down the proportion of foreign students from 18% to about 15% In order to achieve the ‘cap’, universities will expand their intake by 2,000 more places for Singaporean students while retaining the present level of international students This Singapore-style strategy to regulate student migration reflects the persisting conviction that the city-state is to be augmented by a constant supply of talented young people to meet the expanding knowledge economy Yet, the view that international students occupy an important role in fueling the

economic growth is symptomatic of an economic pragmatism that tends to portray

observation that:

More generally, in many ways the voices of international students have been silenced within contemporary debates… This is, potentially, one consequence of the tendency to perceive international students as ‘cash cows’ – the quality of their social and pedagogical experiences comes second to and far below the need to attract international students

In my research on Southeast Asian overseas students in Singapore, I emphasize the need to focus on their everyday social relations and negotiations, and more importantly, the recognition that these youths are embodied agents who construct their own educational and migratory geographies As a starting point, this study views international students as individuals who have certain dispositions and lifestyles that are simultaneously affiliated to the categories of ‘student’, ‘young people’, and

‘migrant’ As Holloway et al (2010: 594) point out, attending to "the voices and subjectivities of young people" as constituted through diverse connections with families, friends, and the larger communities not only has the potential to advance existing knowledges surrounding the social and cultural geographies of education, but also forces us to write stories about the nexus between globalization and education that eschews an adultist perspective

1.3 Research Objectives

At the broadest level, this thesis aims to kick-start a critical project to think

‘time' alongside ‘space' in examining the complexities of cross-border mobilities While the transnational perspective has arguably provided a corrective to the view

concern within migration studies This research focuses on two interrelated objectives

in studying the geographies of student migration First, I examine how temporalities shape the ways in which student migrants articulate their experiences of mobility Second, I unpack how these student migrants perceive and organize intimate relationships through their imagined and lived experiences of time and space These will be explored through the following cross-cutting questions:

spatio-1 What are the motivations for these students to further education in Singapore, and what are the aspirations emerging from their experiences of mobility?

2 What are the meanings, practices, and technologies involved in the production and maintenance of different social relationships in the cross-border context?

3 How do ‘time’ and ‘space’ configure and organize these personal experiences, social relations, and practices that constitute the everyday life of student migration?

1.4 Thesis Map

This chapter has outlined a broad overview of the research impetus, direction

and objectives of this study Chapter 2 provides a critical evaluation of selected

literature on international education, young people’s experiences of education and mobility, and transnational migration studies The theoretical abstractions identified

here will form the basis for the conceptual framing adopted in the thesis In Chapter

3, I will focus on the rationale for Singapore to internationalize its education spaces and the strategies to attract Southeast Asian overseas students Chapter 4 goes on to

map out the methodological route and reflects on the methods and ethical issues

involved in the study The empirical materials will be analyzed in two sections In

Chapter 5, I frame student migrants’ experiences within globalizing spaces of

education through the lens of ‘transition’ to discuss their stories of ‘going away’,

moving with/against time, and orientations toward the future Chapter 6 attends to

the intimate accounts of how different meanings and transnational practices are negotiated in shaping their proximate and distant lives with others I will then

conclude in Chapter 7 by critically reflecting on what a spatio-temporal perspective

has brought to bear on the geographies of student migration

2.1 Introduction

This chapter evaluates selected bodies of literature to draw out theoretical intersections that will orientate a critical analysis of young student migrants’ experiences in Singapore These overlapping strands of work include contributions of scholars who are interested in international education; sociologists, anthropologists, and geographers who study young people’s everyday experiences; and migration scholarship that adopts a transnational perspective to examine cross-border lives While the scope of review is wide, an engagement with a broader set of literature can help de-center certain assumptions made by existing studies of student migration This, I argue, is useful for constructing a more grounded, intimate, and accountable rendering of the globalizing spaces of education I begin by raising the phenomenon

of student migration as an instance of the globalizing spaces of education This will

be discussed in Section 2.2 where I posit international students as inhabitants of

transnational spaces, therefore revealing a more expansive range of relationships, interactions, and practices that constitute their experiences of mobility I also argue that in order to gain a better understanding of the intimate grounds that student migrants navigate, there is a need to accord more weight to the ‘voices’ of these young people in telling stories of their migratory and educational journeys

In Section 2.3, I discuss three critical junctures in the review of existing

literature about young people, education, and migration The theoretical abstractions are organized into three ways of thinking about young people’s experiences in international education spaces – the intersection between lifecourse and migration; the ‘scholarization’ of student lives; and the role of networks and intimate ties that underpin transnational geographies The central concern is to do with the social (re)production of everyday social relations, practices, and affects, and the ways in

which a variety of spaces and times participate in the making, routinizing, and/or disrupting of these elements Building on the perspective of ‘space’ and ‘place’ in examining the geographies of student migration, I propose a critical time-space lens

to further explicate the complex social ordering of social relations and practices in

these geographies Section 2.4 tries to make clear the role of time/temporality (and

space/spatiality) in the making of everyday life by presenting three registers at which the cartographies of time can be unfolded In doing so, I develop a framework that takes ‘space’ and ‘time’ as multiply experienced, practiced, and materialized to analyze the temporal horizons, powers, and textures that co-produce specific spatial continuities and discontinuities in student migrants’ lives

2.2 Globalizing Spaces of Education: a Case of Student Migration

In the face of globalization, education as an enterprise has become highly competitive as a key site in the production of knowledge economies This is especially clear in the case of higher education landscape, where tertiary education is said to be central to the economic well-being of many societies through its contribution to shaping a skilled workforce and sharpening key competencies such as creativity, critical thinking, and capacity for learning As such, governments and institutions are eager to capture globalization’s advantages by developing strategies to internationalize education Indeed, many of the works in this area have pointed out that in order to remain competitive on the global stage, universities have to plug themselves into the wider assemblage of knowledge spaces and develop strategies to attract and retain expertise that are constantly circulating within these networks (Altbach, 2003; Hoyler and Jöns, 2008; Jöns, 2009; Olds, 2007) For example within the Asia-Pacific context, quality assurance and accreditation of international

education is becoming a pressing issue for education providers and consumers in the region (Knight, 2010), and this can become a major factor in influencing students’ choices of places to further education Other studies have begun to trace the impacts

of transnational education markets on both sending and hosting countries, institutions, and practices (Macaranas, 2010; Hall, 2008)

Against the background, and acknowledgement, of the political-economic impacts of the internationalization of education and its potential for stimulating economic growth (Postiglione, 1997; Kemal, 2008), this section sets an agenda for a more critical attention on student migrants as one of the key actors in the globalizing spaces of education

2.2.1 From ‘International’ to ‘Transnational' Student Migration

As Findlay and Tierney (2010) note, international student mobility is becoming ever more significant in the past few decades as the number of people who migrate for education within and across regions continues to increase While policy planners are often interested in the large-scale trends of such flows, it is also important to acknowledge that the complexities of these migrations cannot be fully grasped by referencing to global trends, demographic patterns and country statistics

In light of this, an existing body of scholarly work has focused on the experiences of international students, with especial attention to cross-cultural issues within host societies and institutions These studies show that international students’ experiences

of living and studying in new environments are deeply intertwined with their nationality, ethnicity, class, gender, and the languages they speak (see Andrade and Evans, 2009; Gordon et al., 2000; Kell and Vogl, 2008; Montgomery and McDowell, 2008) However some scholars, notably geographers who research on students as

transnational migrants, have argued that the experiences of international students are also embedded in broader sets of connections that span across both sending and host communities (Waters, 2005; 2006)

Here, it is instructive to underscore the epistemological shift in how migration processes have been conceptualized by both migration scholars and geographers Rather than bracketing international student mobility into a linear process, a transnational perspective argues that migration trajectories are diffused into multiple circuits of movement facilitated by a globalizing capitalist system (Basch et al., 1994) and grounded by multi-stranded networks that connect communities across nation-states (Hannerz, 1996; Portes et al., 1999; Levitt, 2001; Vertovec, 2001) These attachments and ties that straddle between the ‘here and there’ also involve a host of emotions and affects that in turn define and shape mobile experiences (Velayutham and Wise, 2005; 2006) Geographers in particular have shown how examining such relations can challenge the grand narratives of transnational mobilities These counter-narratives, which often emerge from migrants’ everyday spaces (Ley, 2004), include those that challenge the masculinist assumptions embedded within transnational topographies (Pratt and Yeoh, 2003), the excessive accordance of

‘footloosed-ness’ to mobile trans-migrants (Mitchell, 1997), and the revelation of multiple actors and networks involved in constructing transnational experiences that might not necessarily entail physical movements but cultural transfers (Crang et al., 2003)

In the field of student migration, it has been documented that transnational connections are important resources for both young people and their families to advance their socio-economic positions through overseas education (Cairns and Smith, 2011; Waters, 2005; 2006) At the same time, international students also shape

the urban landscapes of host destinations through both their bodily presence and the cultural and material modifications enabled by their transnational connections (Collins, 2008; Fincher and Shaw, 2006) These works not only stress the importance

of observing everyday mobilities, practices and connectivities (Conradson and Latham, 2005a), but also point towards according greater attention to transnational spatialities as “the diverse ongoing connections and networks that bind different parts

of the world together and that are constituted through (and in fact constitute) particular sites and places” (Featherstone et al., 2007: 383-384)

In another words, socio-spatial relations are integral to the shaping of border experiences As international education scholar Gargano (2009: 337) argues, a critical examination of international student mobility demands a more complex

cross-“conceptual space for addressing evolving familial, academic, and social networks across borders” For her, the concept of ‘social fields’ opens up a space to investigate the ways in which student identities and subjectivities are shifting vis-à-vis changing relations with families abroad, educational experiences, and other ties forge at both the local and cross-border contexts However, I argue that this concept may not sufficiently articulate the geographical specificities and role of place in anchoring transnational processes, practices, and affiliations For example, Collins (2008: 166) has shown that Korean students in Auckland find it “possible to at least temporarily reground everyday lives that have been uprooted in the processes of migration” through eating out in places that create an intimate sense of proximity to ‘home’ and feelings of familiarity

In order to more fully understand the practices, meanings, and feelings that emerge from student migrants’ inhabitance of space and place, I suggest that the conceptual lens of transnationalism be critically inflected through the perspective that

student migrants inhabit the grounds of both material and social spaces through their bodies Adopting this perspective could also means that we need to take the ‘voices’ and practices of student migrants as the starting point to think about their migratory experiences, and question how these ‘voices’ and practices are connected to the production and politicization of everyday socio-spatial relations

2.2.2 A ‘Student-Centered’ Perspective: Stories through the ‘Body’

In his paper on the geographies of studentification, Hubbard (2008) points out the importance of situating students at the center of geographical studies on the continuing expansion of education spaces Put it simply, there is a concern with what

matters for these young people Viewed from a ‘student-centered’ approach, the role

of student migrants becomes more salient and meaningful in the production and reproduction of everyday lives within the transnational spaces of education This entails a shift away from the market-oriented approach towards a more humanizing account of the bodies that navigate across borders, including what the bodies are capable of doing – their practices, feelings, imaginations, and all other modes of engagement with the worlds they live in For instance, studies have shown that apart from family and education, friendship and romance also have crucial bearing on how international students negotiate emotional well-being (Wang and Mallinckrodt, 2006; Hendrickson et al., 2010) This calls to attention the importance of understanding student lives through a more expansive lens – one that takes into consideration the diverse thick and thin social relations and subjectivities that are tied to the less palpable sites of their intimate lives, or what Walsh (2009) calls the ‘heart of transnational spaces’

In examining cross-border geographies of embodied relations, the concept of

‘embodied transnationalism’ (Dunn, 2010) has been adopted by several scholars to consider how transnational lives are spatialized according to the bodily movements, practices, imaginations, and a whole range of affective styles resulting from a combination of these ‘body-works’ In a similar vein, Ho and Hatfield (2011) argue that understanding the intimate and quotidian life-worlds of migrants require scholars

to examine the seemingly insignificant norms, routines and everyday experiences Collectively, this set of scholarly literature gathers insights from a range of theories

on the embodied, the emotional, and the non-representational to draw attention to the sociality and materiality of everyday life These include social relations and interactions, as well as the material cultures that constitute the social and cultural worlds that trans-migrants inhabit Here, the body is seen as a central site in which the styles of gender, race, nationality, sexuality and other differences are enacted, but at the same time also capable of disrupting these routinized performances In this sense, there is a politics to the production and reproduction of bodies that are tied to the socio-spatialities of migration events and processes

Building on the theoretical contributions by feminist scholars surrounding the politics of embodiment, Dunn (2010) made several important points about embodied transnational topographies – bodies are disciplined and regulated in migration regimes; they are unevenly empowered through embodied and institutional politics; they bear emotional and affective ties within and across spaces; and bodies are differently emplaced and made mobile across transnational spaces In writing about the concept of embodiment in the context of mobilities, Gorman-Murray (2009: 444) has also argued if we accept that migrants are not disembodied actors, then “sensual corporeality, intimate relationality and other facets of emotional embodiment” can be said to have profound implications on migratory mobilities, trajectories and practices

In this sense, it is the complex interweaving of such elements of the ‘everyday’ – feelings, practices, interactions, materialities – that form the texture of our intimate experiences with the world, which at the same time cannot be divorced from their more ‘global’ and transnational exchanges, flows and rhythms

In bringing the above theoretical perspectives to bear on researching the globalization of education spaces, the project of constructing knowledges based on narratives and observations about student migrants’ everyday lives is not so much of

an indulgent practice, but seen as a critical strategy to produce alternative scripts of contemporary globalization processes In Mountz and Hyndman’s (2006: 458) words,

in order “to question disembodied knowledge production”, there is a need to consciously “propose embodied epistemologies that create more accountable renderings of globalization” The authors also reminded that embodied social relations, while deeply grounded in the everyday and experienced through the ‘body’, are subtly connected to the intimate stories emerging, and often in a simultaneous fashion, from other places and times Hence, a ‘student-centered’ perspective points towards foregrounding, amongst others, at least two theoretical orientations that will underpin the rest of this thesis First, the attendance to student voices through individual biographies means a heightened sensitivity to the (re)production of identities, feelings, and practices in the spaces they inhabit Second, although these elements of their everyday lives emerge through the ongoing interactions occurring within present space-time, they are constituted through the stretching of socio-spatialities that connect to a variety of places, sites and scales

2.3 Critical Perspectives on Young People, Education, and Migration

In the previous section, a critical agenda has been contoured around the study

of globalizing education spaces to argue that we need to shift out attention away from

‘globalist’ narratives towards a more ‘grounded’ and ‘embodied’ approach This research specifically focuses on student migrants as important ‘bodies’ hitherto less examined in existing literature on geographies of education In order to further Gargano’s (2009: 337) proposal to “better understand how educational sojourners position themselves within academic and international student communities, make sense of their networks of associations, and envision possibilities”, it is useful to consider a broader range of scholarly perspectives that have sought to examine the different geographies that student migrants navigate It is important to point out that

in discussing a broader range of scholarly works, I am not aiming to provide an exhaustive précis Rather, the literature presented in the following is an outcome of abstracting what I consider to be critical junctures in the relatively disparate sets of literature These abstractions will then lay the foundation to frame the conceptual approach adopted in this study, as well as be put into their material contexts to reflect

on the ‘voices’ of student migrants (see Chapter 5 & 6)

In this section, I draw on scholarly works produced by geographers, and to a lesser extent anthropologists and sociologists, to discuss three sets of critical perspectives that will nuance our understanding of the lives of educational sojourners Towards the end, I connect these strands of perspectives through the intellectual lens

of social reproduction, and argue that student migration is at once a response to the globalizing spaces of education as well as an arena for the making, maintenance, and resistance towards the routinizing effects of these forces

2.3.1 Lifecourse, Mobility, and Migration

In Findlay et al.’s (2006) study of student mobility as a process that links

life-stages of schooling, university life and entrance into the labour market, the authors argue that there is a need to situate knowledges of mobility not only geographically but also in relation to different life-course trajectories According to Bailey (2009: 407), the lifecourse approach “seeks to describe the structures and sequences of events and transitions through an individual’s life” Indeed life-stages, events, and other significant moments have long been acknowledged to be part of migration motivations and trajectories (Mortimer and Shanahan, 2004) For instance, King and Ruiz-Gelices (2003) have shown that international students concoct strategies across education, career and even residency or citizenship statuses to improve their present and future situations Similarly, Brooks and Everett (2008) also show how future plans and aspirations are integral to the ways in which young migrants strategize to accumulate social and cultural capital This can be in the form of choosing which institutions to study at or making plans for the subsequent migration destination upon graduation

At the same time, these key moments in the lives of young people are not disconnected from the changing gendered, classed, and intergenerational relations shaping their decisions about mobility at the sites of family and community Whether these relations play out as constraints or opportunities, and are advantageous or disadvantageous towards them (Langevang and Gough, 2009; Ansell et al., 2011), there is a sense that their mobility is not always smooth and straightforward Instead there are constant negotiations that take place throughout the course of migration – from the ‘points’ of departure to arrival and perhaps eventual return All these

‘points’ present complex situations, relations, and often emotional dilemmas that need to be examined in relation to the young people’s personal understanding of growing up in a world that is increasingly porous and interconnected The rhythms of

growing up not only shape their subjectivities at the level of the ‘everyday’; they are also simultaneously shaped by young people’s experiences of other (competing) rhythms across different sites and scales

Jarvis et al (2011: 519) conceptualize this convergence of different rhythms

at various scales as a form of ‘multi-scalar rhythms’, whereby “the ways in which different aspects of space, time, and lifecourse intersect in relation to the multiplicity

of demands” that are experienced on a daily basis At one level, this is a call for scholars who are interested in deploying the lifecourse perspective to also examine the time-space coordination found in banal practices, actions and narratives But it is also, as they argue, exactly the attendance to negotiation and coordination of everyday life across multiple time-spaces that will expose the asymmetry of power relations and the instability of structures A similar argument can be found in writings from geographies of young people Hopkins and Pain (2007) argued that everyday social interactions with different groups of people produce and re-shape discourses about age, and that ‘age’ should thus be understood as fluid and relational over and within the lifecourse This means that the predominant view that biological age structures one’s lifecourse mobilities and trajectories is no longer tenable, and instead age itself as a social category is “constantly produced in and through the experiential plane(s) of everyday life” (Barker et al., 2009: 5)

Taken together, these studies suggest that even if migration appears to be one

of the many events occurring in one’s lifecourse, the idea that there is a ‘right time’ to move (Metcalfe, 2006) reflects the assumptions that people make about their lives in the past, present, and future Whether these assumptions are figments of the mind or products of material relations, a close examination of the specific timings and spacings of these narratives can open up more critical understandings of student

migrants as young, aspiring, and embodied beings

2.3.2 ‘Scholarization’ of Young People’s Lives

A study that focuses on student migrants’ experiences cannot sidestep the question of their educational experiences Institutions such as schools and universities are central to the dissemination of information and values, as well as providing spaces

in which students encounter similarities and differences As Philo and Parr (2000: 514) argue, institutional settings “restrain, control, treat, ‘design’ and ‘produce’ particular and supposedly improved versions of human minds and bodies” This view has also been termed by Ennew (1994: 126) as the “scholarization” of young people’s lives, where temporal scheduling and spatial containment have become remarkably intense in the production of children, youths, and adults Viewing young people’s educational experiences in this manner also means being cognizant that their social relations, practices and identities are often structured, produced, and shaped through the institutionalization, normative ordering and daily practices of time in a variety of spaces operating simultaneously in their lives (McGregor, 2004; Hopkins, 2010)

As Holloway et al (2011: 2) note in the context of neoliberalizing knowledge economies “because education for all seems to offer the route to social mobility for aspirational individuals”, it is a resource highly valued by young people In this sense, education is often held as a key site through which the body learns to become ‘better’, more skillful and knowledgeable, and instilled with values Yet, social geographers have also pointed out that the places in which education is carried out are often places where inequalities are reproduced Here, the promise of education is problematized through an exposure of the power geometries that cut across ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability (Burgess and Wilson, 2005; Holloway and Valentine, 2003;

Holt, 2007; Johnston et al., 2007; Mac an Ghaill, 1994; Skelton and Valentine, 2002) These authors have argued that bodies are marked out as ‘in place’ or ‘out of place’ through various discourses and practices that circulate within and beyond the boundaries of the school, thus rendering young people differential access to resources and mobilities Hollingworth and Archer (2010: 598) have also demonstrated how

“feelings about place” in terms of positive attachments and fear and disgust have implications on the children of London’s working-class in terms of their relationship with education

However, in the face of such constraints, young students are also shown to be able to “find ways to circumvent the constructions or bounds placed on their use of space” (Catling, 2005: 327) For instance, Holloway and Valentine (2000) have explored the notion of ‘play/playing’ in the construction of young people’s everyday experiences through their edited volume on children’s geographies, where ‘play’ times and spaces are strategically employed by young people to negotiate independence, autonomy, and freedom Similarly, Katz (2004) also showed how young people’s bodies are reproduced through everyday routines and interactions through both ‘play’ and ‘work’ – they offer young people opportunities to learn and transform existing bodily practices, knowledges, and ideas that in turn create new spaces

As Hopkins (2011) argue, spaces of education are differently constructed, contested, and experienced by various groups of people, leading to different degrees

of inclusion and exclusion, comfort and discomfort with inhabiting in host destinations In the context of student migrants, these spaces are experienced as a stretching of socio-spatial relations across borders As Holloway et al (2010: 595) suggest, “rather than focusing on education within specific sites, we [also] need to

trace the webs of connections” across different places to show “how sociospatial practices in each shape children, youth and families’ experience”

2.3.3 The Networks, Connections, and Ties that Bind

The view that there are transnational spatialities to the intimate lives of

student migrants (as proposed in Section 2.2) draws attention to the ways in which

networks, connections, and relationships are forged across borders Very often, these connectivities are enacted between migrants and non-migrants, and contingent upon the continuous flows and exchange of information, money, and objects, or what Levitt (2001) calls the economic and social remittances In this way, the socio-spatial relations spanning across different places are not disembodied, but rather constituted through the investment of personal meanings and feelings that enable cross-border relations to be imagined, articulated and maintained as close and proximate in the face of geographical distance In existing literature, geographers and migration scholars have studied three distinct forms of close ties – family, friendship, and romance – as intimacies (Giddens, cited by Bell and Coleman, 1999) that bind migrants and non-migrants together

Waters's (2005; 2006) study on Hong Kong young trans-migrants who move

to Canada for education discusses how student migrants act as agents for accumulating social and cultural capital primarily in the form of established networks and ties, which in turn can be converted into physical and social mobility for the family over time Indeed, this is a common migration strategy found in many studies

on East Asian transnational education, whether they are described as ‘parachute’ or

‘satellite’ kids, and ‘astronaut’ or kirogi (‘wild geese’) families (Yeoh et al., 2012)

However, this conceptualization of student migration also appears to be extrapolated

from the typical Chinese strategic family relations resting on notions of filial piety and Confucian thought Concomitantly, it also tends to delimit the understanding of intimate affiliations and negotiations of intimacy to the site of the family In Weller's (2010) study on children’s transfer to new schools, she shows how young people actively connect and disconnect with friends and family members, constructing each

set of social relations as more ‘intimate’ than the other across specific and strategic

times and spaces In this sense, circumscribing student migrants’ experiences to that

of the family can potentially reify certain ethno-familial discourses as “rigid categorizations” that may “fail to recognize [other] elements of identity significant to individuals and/or collectives" (Weller, 2010: 885) This approach resonates with Valentine’s (2008a: 2105) observation that "intimacy and care increasingly takes place beyond the family, for example, through networks of friends and lovers"; that some close ties “may be more or less meaningful” depending on the interactions that take place in specific time-space contexts

One of the most well-established literature on how intimate connections stretch across places in the context of migration is that of studies on diasporic communities and their desires for ‘home’ (Brah, 1997; Espiritu, 2003; Blunt, 2005); and the migratory journeys, practices, and labour involved in the maintenance of cross-border familial relationships (Bryceson and Vuorela, 2002; Yeoh et al., 2005) For example, geographers have studied the mobile geographies of home by looking at the ways in which migrants are able to feel ‘at home’ whilst on the move (dwell-in-travelling) and become ‘mobile’ through mobilizing artefacts, imaginations and practices that enable them to connect ‘home’ in other places and times (travel-in-dwelling) Through this, it is argued that the traditional place-based concept of home can no longer explain the realities of migrant experiences and home-making practices

(Blunt and Dowling, 2006; Fortier, 2001) Shifting their emphasis from ‘home’ to

‘family’, scholars who study transnational families have also argued that despite being physically dispersed, family members continue to maintain communication with one another to substitute for physical absence through remittances, letters and phone calls (Asis et al., 2004; Chamberlain and Leydesdorff, 2004); or negotiate caring roles and relations with children or elderly kin back in migrant-sending communities in order to fill the gap of the ‘missing’ family member (Baldassar, 2007; Gardner, 2006; Parreñas, 2005)

In Conradson and Latham’s (2005b: 294) work on New Zealand young migrants, they highlight that apart from the importance of community and kinship relations for international mobility, there is also a “remarkable centrality of friendship networks” to the configurations of their transnational practices, mobilities, and trajectories Brooks and Waters (2010) have also shown that friendship networks operate alongside kinship and romantic relationships to shape transnational mobility

trans-in many overlapptrans-ing ways As Pahl (2006) has argued, friendship is somethtrans-ing that needs to be nurtured, and this relational work is often predicated on both negotiations around material returns that the sociality might generate as well as the affective sense

of connection deriving from the activities, interactions and times spent together In this sense, “friendship is important because it is a key aspect of patterns of sociability and the recognition (or not) of solidarities and communal belonging” (Bowlby, 2011: 605) At the same time, because friendships (like any other social relations) do not operate outside the exchanges of personal knowledges and information, it is not just any form of sociality but one that can be considered as intimate and has immense potential in shaping both individual aspirations and human dynamics (Jamieson, 1998)

The third form of intimacy – cross-border romance – is only just beginning to receive attention by scholars in recent years Cross-border romance can be differentiated into a variety of (perhaps interconnected) ‘phenomena’ such as pen-pals, internet dating, commercially-arranged marriages, and long-distance relationships (Padilla et al., 2007) Through examining these intimate interactions and exchanges, Constable (2003) argues that variants of romance on the ‘global stage’ operate through the highly complex spatialities, politics, and cultures of gender, race, nationality, and other socio-material forces

Collectively, these works have demonstrated the range of caring efforts and affects, as well as the social, economic and cultural politics that undergird these practices, which are invested in the ‘doing’ of transnational networks, connections and relationships While some scholars have argued that traditional sites of intimacy such as that of family and marriage are undergoing challenges from a wider set of affiliations that can now be considered intimate, geographers and migration scholars have also documented the resilience of family ties in the maintenance of emotional proximity between migrants and those who are ‘left behind’ (Parreñas, 2005; Yeoh et al., 2005; Pratt, 2009) These entanglements are further complicated by the rapid changes in technologies of communication and transport In addressing this aspect of how contemporary intimacies are transformed, Valentine (2006) notes that transnational practices in making contact, maintaining co-presence, and coordinating household arrangements have already begun to change; and these shifting practices both reflect and constitute the spatial patterns and temporal rhythms of intimate relationships

2.3.4 The Social (Re)production of Everyday Life

In centering students at the heart of the everyday, quotidian, and transnational geographies of education migration, geographers have expounded on the power of space and place in producing, differentiating, and maintaining the socio-interactions and relations of these young people on the move Whether these are discussed through their class-travelling aspirations, youthful impulses, changing subject positions and identities, or the connectivities and ties that bind them with people and places afar, there is a strong underlying concern with how these bodies learn to labour (c.f Willis, 1977) across space and time Firstly, labour here is taken to be all forms

of embodied and affective work As this thesis will ensue, migrant bodies have to adjust to new socio-cultural environments; invent ways of establishing and maintaining relationships with families, friends and other important members in their lives; negotiate transitional and transnational identities and subject positions; and attend to their own aspirations Secondly, as suggested by Katz’s (2004: x) conceptualization that “social reproduction embodies the whole jumble of cultural forms and practices that constitute and create everyday life and the meanings by which people understand themselves in the world”, it is important to understand these body-works and labour as central to the social (re)production of student migrants’ everyday lives Hitherto, what we have witnessed is a dominant emphasis on the multiple ways in which spaces are complicit in the social ordering of everyday life across migration, education, and transnational space Yet, geographer Allan Pred

(1981: 10, emphasis in original) has argued “the details of social reproduction, individual socialization, and structuration are constantly spelled out by the intersection of particular individual paths with particular institutional projects occurring at specfic temporal and spatial locations” It follows that social

reproduction is both a spatial and temporal affair

Indeed, one of the key theoretical abstractions I have tried to highlight above

(Section 2.3.1-2.3.3) is that of ‘time’ Inspired by feminist scholars’ earlier work on

women’s experiences of time-space, as well as recent geographical debates on the temporal character of space and spatial character of time (Massey, 2005; May and Thrift, 2004), I am interested in reflecting on, and making clear, how ‘time’ is also complicit in the production of student migrants’ intimate lives Central to this argument is Henri Lefebvre’s (1991; 2004) work on rhythmanalysis, which builds on the idea that time-space interaction undergirds everyday processes through repetitions

of ‘linear’ and ‘rhythmic’ times He argues that the body inhabits the spaces between the self and society as well as lives out their different temporalities; and it is through this interaction between bodies, space, and time that social reproduction takes place Reflecting on Lefebvre’s work on rhythmanalysis, Simonsen (2005) writes that the concept of ‘rhythms’ “can be defined as movement and differences in repetition, as the interweaving of concrete times, but it always implies a relation of time to space or place” It is this underscoring of the differences in repetition, relationality across

multiple ‘times’, and the deep implications between ‘time’ and ‘space’ that will form

the basis for me to examine student migration as an arena for the making, maintenance, and resistance of the routinizing effects of globalizing education spaces

2.4 Unfolding Cartographies of Time

This section leads to a discussion of ‘time’ as a “socially constructed medium” and which is “not a self-evident category against which the world can be measured” (Crang, 2011: 331) Hence, there is a need to make clear the ways in which time is folded into the everyday fabric of social life In the history of

geographical thought, there has been several scriptings of the ‘cartographies’ of time1

To name but a few significant examples, historical geographer Darby (1962) studied the histories of places through what he called the ‘comparative statistics’ to conceptualize space through slices of time; Hagerstrand’s (1975; 1982) notion of time-geography as an analysis of people’s everyday geographies mapped across a finite budget of time and defined geometric space; and Harvey’s (1989; 1990) celebrated idea of time-accelerating vis-a-vis space-diminishing in the face of globalizing information communication technologies and practices Several geographers have also revisited philosophical writings (Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Heidegger, 1978; Grosz, 1995) that emphasize time as subjective and experiential to more fully explicate the fluidities and multiplicities of time and temporality, making

it apparent that there are many registers at which time is experienced, practiced, and materialized

In the last decade, human geography has witnessed a renewed and explicit interest in engaging with notions of time and temporality (see Crang, 2011; Jones, 2004; Massey, 2005; May and Thrift, 2001) These works not only collectively argue that space and time should not be separated in the study of geographical imaginations, practices and materialities, they also give evidence to how “time-space effects can operate contemporaneously at a variety of different scales” (c.f Jarvis et al., 2011: 520-521) In the following, I broadly sketch out three ways in which spatio-temporal operations and effects have been apprehended in existing scholarly works – (i) past,

present, and future trajectories; (ii) rhythmic and power geometries; and (iii) affective and felt textures

1 I borrowed this phrase from the title of a book by Rosenberg and Grafton (2010),

Cartographies of Time, which features a genealogy of graphic representations of time

in Europe and the United States since 1450s I borrow the phrase to denote the

2.4.1 Trajectories

The first approach centers on time as experienced through the temporal horizons of past, present and future, where the past is constituted through the saturation and diffusion of memories, the present as the immediate experience of reality, and the future as the distant routes mapped onto time In Ahmed et al.’s (2003: 9) writing on transnational migration and diaspora, they argue that migrants are in an on-going process of “creating both pasts and futures through inhabiting the grounds of the present” This perspective not only demands us to view transnational migrants’ feelings of grounding and uprooting as products of power relations framed

in socio-cultural differences and political-economic regimes, but more importantly points towards the power of imaginations that can transform ‘staying put’ into a process of being “situated yet mobile” (Smith 2011: 181) Through this, they show that transnational lives are constituted through the thick and thin social relations forged in a “multi-local life-world” (Vertovec 2001: 578), and these life-worlds cut across spaces and times to present complex positions and encounters that produce, reshape and/or maintain social identities

Viewing time as trajectories not only draws attention to the ways in which

localized experiences and mobilities are constituted by social foldings of pasts, presents and futures, but also gives weight to the human experience of time This approach underlines the fact that the formation of subjective experiences, identities and practices are not bounded in place or time, but possess the capacity to be mobile and dynamic across individual lifecourse or even as the bodies producing them inhabit the ‘here and now’ This also parallels many contemporary insights on migratory mobilities that recognize identities are not fixed in particular space/times, but draw upon them to become realized (Crouch, 2010) through what Gregory (2004:

28) calls the “imaginative geography” of “migrant horizons”

2.4.2 Geometries

The second approach draws our attention to how bodies “are technologies of space and time, the routinization of certain specific spatial and temporal practices” (Mendieta, 2002: 182) This relationship between time and biopolitics returns us to the centrality of bodies and embodiment in thinking about how bodies become

‘technologized’ to reproduce space and time (Lefebvre, 2004) This view of geometries ties in closely to the spatialization of time, one in which time is seen as

time-interlocking grids of relations, technologies and strategies aimed at the control of time and colonization of the future For instance in Ennew’s (1994: 126) critique of the

“timetabling effect” of the “curricularization”, or “scholarization”, of children’s lives, she argues the ‘tyranny of time’ has meant that young people are plunged into the rhythms of cultural ordering across different scales and regimes Indeed, education spaces (such as university campuses, schools or even nurseries) have become central

to this temporal regime This, as she argued, has profound impacts on the ways in

which young people use other times such as ‘free time’ and ‘play time’, become

time-conscious adults, and develop temporal reflexivities that may reinforce and/or challenge the normative architecture of time

While temporal schedules structure everyday lives, Crang (2001: 194) also adds that people are not just “moving through space-time but making it” This contribution is crucial as it highlights the role of agency that can work against the fixing power of time-spaces, and instead reveals their incoherence through examining the practices that go into making and sustaining them In this view, studies on children and young people’s use of time in everyday spaces have alerted us to the

innovative and sometimes surprising ways in which time-spaces can be negotiated (Harker, 2005; Thomson, 2005) Valentine and Hughes’ (2012) work on internet gambling has also shown that individuals’ familiarity with family routines can be mobilized to create pockets of time-spaces which allow non-permissable activities to take place even within the intimate space of the home

2.4.3 Textures

Lastly, as much as time is experienced through the idiom of discourses and the materiality of practices, it is also sensed and felt As Highmore (2010: 88) astutely points out, it is “clear that time doesn’t simply exist as a uniform pattern that follows the regular beats of a ticking clock The common saying that ‘time flies when you’re having fun’ recognizes that experiential time doesn’t follow the standardized time of clocks” In this way, the felt experience of time constitutes an intimate way of knowing time in which feelings of duration such as pacing, slowing, accelerating and waiting are produced in relation to the changing circumstances experienced across different sites and scales For example in her writing on women’s experiences of waiting, Gray (2011) argues that waiting is not simply a feeling of time as suspended, but can also be an active process that significantly shapes life projects This perspective shows how feelings about temporality can actively reshape subjectivities and practices in the face of growing concerns surrounding the rise of ‘affective technologies’ in manipulating emotions and temporalities (Thrift, 2004)

Paralleling this effort to foreground the role of agency in human experience of time, Flaherty (2010: 34) also argues that agency is located across the spectrum of temporalities we encounter on an everyday basis She cites examples of how feelings,

or ‘textures’, of time are constantly manipulated; such as when we feel that “time is

passing too slowly, we speed it up; and (less frequently) when time is passing too quickly, we slow it down” Finally, Highmore (2010: 96) also observes that “affective states such as anger, frustration, happiness, resentment, bitterness, laughter and guilt

do more than slow down or speed up time In one sense they could all be seen as intensifying a sense of time… but these intensities have their peculiar durations” Consider how transnational emotional attachments and affiliations can intensify at particular moments (for example when looking at photographs of family members) and dissipate as migrant time-spaces become saturated with the labour of work; or how happiness can expand time while guilt can prolong it All these senses and sensibilities of time can influence the experiences, practices, and even the actual mobilities of migrants as their notions of ‘visit’ and ‘return’ are influenced in the process

2.4.4 Time, Space, and Geographies of Student Migration

Brooks and Waters (2011: 114) argue that there is a need “for an overtly

geographical perspective on international student mobility” This means that

international student migration has to be viewed as a process that is spatially differentiated and uneven; that the movement and mobility of some students is relationally implicated in the non-movement and immobility of others; and that students themselves are embodied individuals who traverse places and obstacles to build networks, accumulate capital, and develop intimate social relations with both

the ‘familiar’ and the ‘strange’ I build on this geographical perspective by

conceptualizing ‘space’ as integrally time-space (Massey, 1992) Foregrounding time alongside space reminds us that migration is a process inherently about the movement over/in space and time (c.f Cresswell, 2006); that temporality punctuates our cross-

border rhythms as well as affects our capacities to navigate a world in motion (see Cwerner, 2001) Just as space is multifarious in its character, time is multiply experienced, interpreted, and articulated; and this has implications for the

geographies of transnational student migration

First, I suggest that if time is configured into the analysis of the ‘intimate' geographies of student migration, the politics and socio-spatial relations involved in governing and sustaining everyday life become more complex For instance, the labour of making time for school, family, work and play; the rhythm and frequency of maintaining ties across borders by gift and/or remittance-sending migrants; constructing futurity of work, marriage and setting up a family; negotiating when to visit and/or return ‘home' - all these imaginative and material relations operate contemporaneously to specific rhythms, routines and timetables that cross-cut with cultural, institutional, economic, and embodied politics

Second, I argue that "time is essential to the cultivation of our relationships" (Flaherty, 2010: 109), and co-presences are often created through both spatial and temporal practices In addition, as much as time/space can be mobilized to create feelings of togetherness, the intimate knowledge of everyday routines can also be exploited by individuals to create pockets of secretive spaces and emotional distances (Valentine and Hughes, 2012) For Deborah Thien (2005: 192), intimacy has a

"distinct socio-spatial character" that "assumes a distance covered, a space traversed

to achieve a desired familiarity with another" She also notes how intimacies can be conducted through intimacy-as-proximity as well as intimacy-as-distance, with the latter being a more flexible way of doing intimacy and already widely documented in the literature on transnational migration Yet, this emphasis on spatiality as a primordial for conceptualizing intimacy can only at best be partial and indeed, the

argument that temporalities such as duration, speed, frequency, and timing can be mobilized to convey social messages about intimacy has long been made (Zerubavel, 1987)

2.5 Concluding Comments

As Horton and Kraftl (2006: 72-83) provoke, there is “much more to say

about the ways in which the everyday might be conceptualized”, and one way is for geographers working with young people to “critique and expand various conceptualisations of growing up, going on, and the practices of timing and spacing”

Time has largely been an a priori in extant studies of migration processes and

regimes, and rarely raised as a theoretical moment that demands scholarly attention This chapter has sought to re-assert ‘time’ as one of the many key modalities to examine transnational migration experiences by foregrounding a constellation of temporalities as crucial to understanding migration processes Adapting Crouch’s

(2010: 70-71) writing in Flirting with Space, transnational spaces can be seen as

“space[s] of heterogeneous temporalities and rhythms of clock time and work hours, seasons, timetables, emotions and our own time or times; calm, hectic, dense or superficial in mixtures”

In this thesis, I deploy the terms ‘time’ and ‘space’ as discrete entities even though scholars such as May and Thrift (2001) have argued for a perspective of

‘TimeSpace’ (without the ‘–hyphen’) to insist on their co-existence I am less concerned with the ontological construct of ‘time’ and ‘space’ than to make clear how these two abstractions, when held in tension as mutually constituted and operative,

can unfold space through time and time through space In another words, the study of

‘time’ can actually mean quite little unless we embed its temporal effects into the

spatial configurations of everyday life Similarly, the study of ‘space’ can potentially gain much more from the social studies of ‘time’ and be cognizant that space is only realized through the coming together of social relations and practices that are embedded in their respective temporal patterns Following the theoretical intersections elucidated in this chapter, I seek to nuance current understanding of transnational student migration through exploring these spatialities and temporalities that make up the everyday life

3.1 Introduction

This chapter provides a contextual framing to the rationale and strategies involved in the making of Singapore’s higher education landscape Specifically, it focuses on how the nation-state harnesses education as a pathway to overcome the

limits of resources by internationalizing its spaces of education In Section 3.2, I

present the rationale for Singapore’s mobilization of education as part of the national strategy to boost its economy and transform the city into a ‘Global Schoolhouse’

This is followed by a focused discussion in Section 3.3 on the vested interest by both

the public and private education sectors in promoting and sustaining Singapore as education hub in (Southeast) Asia In concluding, I suggest that locating Southeast Asian students in the specificities of immigration and education policies provides a sharper analytical context to understand their experiences of as young students and migrants

3.2 Education for Internationalization and Global Aspirations

Singapore is an excellent example of how education is mobilized to propel the city-state onto the global stage alongside building a nation of globally-oriented subjects A key milestone in shaping Singapore’s higher education landscape is the introduction of a policy of internationalization outlined in the Strategic Economic Plan in 1991 (Ministry of Trade and Industry, 1991) Two major areas identified in the plan for sustained attention are to enhance the existing pool of ‘human resources’ and to transform the city-state into a ‘global city’ Recognizing that the new-born nation’s only resource that could be relied on was its human capital, there was a strong focus on ‘upgrading’ the ‘nation’ through education and simultaneously attracting talent from around the world to augment the local labour force Against the

backdrop of an urgency to boost the nation-state’s economy and to develop a competitive advantage in the region, a commitment was made in the mid-1960s to upgrade human capital through state investment in education and vocational training (Bercuson, 1995) At the same time, with the guidelines set out in the 1991 Economic Plan for Singapore to become an international learning centre, a significant expansion

of post-secondary institutions such as polytechnics and universities was underway (Gopinathan, 1997)

In 2002, the ‘Global Schoolhouse’ blueprint was started to increase intake of international students An initiative involving multiple government agencies – the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), the Singapore Tourism Board (STB), SPRING Singapore, International Enterprise Singapore, the Council for

Private Education, and the Ministry of Education (MOE) – called Singapore Education was launched in 2003 to actualize this blueprint Part of this project not

only builds upon the earlier efforts undertaken by state agencies to invite reputable overseas universities to set up branch campuses in Singapore, private education institutions are also ever more encouraged to stay competitive in the US$2.2 trillion global international student market here (The Straits Times, 17 Jul 2010) This has led

to the dubbing of Singapore as one of the ‘emerging contenders’ (alongside China and Malaysia) in the world market for international students in higher education (Verbik and Lasanowski, 2007) In 2005, there were approximately 66,000 foreign students in Singapore The long-term target is to host 150,000 foreign students by

2015, thence creating 22,000 jobs and increasing the education sector’s contribution

to the gross domestic product from 1.9% to 5% (The Business Times, 21 May 2008) The ‘Global Schoolhouse’ project is indeed a well-calculated investment to build a

“network of foreign alumni who not only graduate from the universities but also,

would have lived and worked in Singapore” (Sanderson, 2002: 94) Although the number of international students dropped from 95,000 to 91,500 between 2009 and

2010 when the recession dug in (The Straits Times, 11 Nov 2010), there is no doubt that Singapore continues to attract and draw in large volumes of foreigners annually, especially at the university level

In a speech addressed to hundreds of university students, academics and public observers at a ministerial forum, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (2009) reminded his audience that attracting young talented individuals from different parts

of the world is not only paramount to raising Singapore’s educational standards, but also “create[s] a more stimulating environment which will benefit” the local students

as well as “provide opportunities for Singaporeans to build networks, [and] to prepare them to operate all over Asia” Roping in examples of top western universities, he described the state of Singapore’s higher education landscape with especial attention

to universities:

Universities are a microcosm of society There are many international students in our universities and I think it is the right thing for us to do because it is critical to the universities that we bring in international students If you look at the outstanding world class universities, Stanford, Harvard, Cambridge, they all have a significant proportion of international students, especially postgraduates They gather the best talent from around the world, they create a cosmopolitan campus environment which promotes cross-cultural learning and exchange of ideas and learning to get along with one another, learning about the world

As the Prime Minister (2010) reiterates in his National Day message to Singaporeans,

“without an inflow [of foreign talent], over time, our economy and society will lose vibrancy, our citizens will enjoy fewer opportunities and our shining red dot will grow dimmer” On one level, this is a rhetoric that seeks to assuage the increasing

ambivalence felt by Singaporeans towards incoming waves of foreign talent On another level, this reiteration reflects the unwavering economic imperative embedded

in Singapore’s astute mobilization of education as a vehicle to achieve its global aspirations as well as remaining competitive in the global economy

3.3 Singapore as Education Hub in (Southeast) Asia

While the key aim of the ‘Global Schoolhouse’ project is to transform Singapore into a global arena recognized for its high-quality education and with students from all over the world, Asian countries, especially China and India, remain the key sources of foreign students Furthermore, Singapore is also not a ‘new’ destination for education in the Southeast Asian region as it has long attracted foreign students from Malaysia and Indonesia (Yeoh and Lin, 2012) Indeed, it is instructive

to note that since the turn of the century, Singapore’s efforts to internationalize its education landscape is also beginning to draw on the ASEAN regional ties By 2009, Myanmar and Vietnam have rose to the top to join China, India, Indonesia and Malaysia as the top source countries of international students in Singapore (The Straits Times, 17 Apr 2009) Although this geographical reach can be viewed as an outcome of the political-economic strategy to strengthen Singapore’s position in region, there is also an agenda to promote the city-state’s education landscape as combining “the best of global knowledge with the wisdom of Asian insights” (Singapore Education, 2011) In this way, Singapore is marketed as a unique destination distinguished from the rest of the top universities, as a destination of

“educational excellence” that is well-connected to other parts of the world on the one hand, and being boasted as a “multicultural nation” capable of rubbing against Asian competitors such as Japan and Korea to become an education hub in Asia on the other

hand (Singapore Education, 2011)

One of the key mechanisms through which a sustained stream of foreign students from the region is drawn to Singapore is the government administered ASEAN scholarship scheme The scholarship, particularly with a emissary slogan

‘Nurturing Young Minds’ (see Figure 3.1), was introduced with the aim of attracting

young people from within the region who are of ASEAN nationalities, except Singaporeans – Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, The Philippines and Vietnam – to receive their education in Singapore With the exception of Brunei and Malaysia in which the scholarship is tenable for 6 years beginning from Secondary One, the earliest education level individuals of other ASEAN nationalities are eligible to apply for the scholarship is Secondary Three (Ministry of Education, 2011b) Students who enter Singapore to study via this route have to cease their scholarships once they finish their pre-university education (Junior College), after which they will be required to apply for a separate ASEAN scholarship specifically for undergraduate studies at one of the four local public-autonomous universities – National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore Management University (SMU) and Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD)2 – if they wish to continue education in Singapore

2 In addition the three local universities (NUS, NTU and SMU) that have established

a level of reputation in both the local and international contexts, the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) was introduced in 2008 to the local university landscape with a core focus on tertiary education in the science and technology Its first intake of students was in April 2012

Figure 3.1: ASEAN Scholarship, Nurturing Young Minds

Apart from the sustained effort of internationalizing Singapore’s education landscape through the ASEAN scholarship scheme, Singaporean schools and private education agencies are also actively recruiting top students from the region such as Vietnam, Thailand, and Myanmar One of the fastest growing private higher education institutions, Singapore Institute of Management (SIM) Global Education, tops the league amongst many private education providers in Singapore (The Straits Times, 17 Jul 2009) The main reason cited for this phenomenal growth was the active recruitment of international students since 2004 when the institution underwent

a restructuring Recognizing how ‘going international’ can bring about such catalytic impact on the growth of education companies, other institutions such as the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) have also joined in the chase for more foreign students to gain a larger share of the education pie Specifically in recent years, NAFA has “been marketing aggressively to South-east Asian nations” as the

“obvious choice for arts research and training in the region” (The Straits Times, 20 Jan 2010)

While international students who came to Singapore for education through the

ASEAN scholarship are not subjected to any bond, these students will also come under the Tuition Grant Scheme which requires non-Singaporean students to be contractually obliged to work for Singapore-based companies for 3 years upon graduation The Tuition Grant Scheme was introduced in 1980 with the aim of subsidizing tertiary education in Singapore, and this is open to both local and foreign students enrolled in full-time diploma and undergraduate courses at selected institutions.3 This means that the period of stay in Singapore for most of these foreign students is not only bound to the number of years their education takes to complete, but also extends beyond Eventually, some of these foreign students may decide to stay and work in Singapore under work permits after their 3-year contract, or even become permanent residents of the country In fact, this is part of the strategic calculations made by the government in the bid to compete for young ‘talent’ to supplement Singapore’s workforce as well as enhancing the city-state’s prominence

on the global stage (Sanderson, 2002)

3.4 Conclusion

This chapter has provided a broad overview of Singapore’s higher education landscape with especial attention to the emergence of a particular post-independence education system, its emphasis on internationalization and more recently, the aspiration of placing the city-state onto the global arena through the imagination of Singapore as a premier education hub and ‘Global Schoolhouse’ I have shown that while the process of internationalizing the education landscape requires a globally-oriented approach, there remains a vested interest by both the public and private

3 These institutions include the four local universities, five polytechnics, Institutes of Technical Education, two local colleges for the arts (LASELLE College of the Arts