Date of Award

2021

Document Type

Honors Thesis (Open Access)

Department

Colby College. Anthropology Dept.

Advisor(s)

Winifred Tate

Second Advisor

Mary Beth Mills

Abstract

This thesis presents the research that I have done for the award of Honors in Anthropology. The following text begins with a vignette that highlights identity-making and spatialization among international students in a moment of precarity and visibility. The “Introduction” records the development of my research from its initial topics to its current form, my methodology, my positionality, and the ethics of my research. Following this, in the chapter titled “Internationality,” I lay out the interwoven social, institutional, and political processes which shape the experiences of academic migrants. Because the purpose of this chapter is to fully contextualize my argument, it does not present a comprehensive account of all the processes that my interlocutors must navigate at Colby. In the final chapter, “Identity-making and spatialization,” I connect the processes which produce “need” for my interlocutors to the central topics of my research, identity-making and spatialization. I argue that my interlocutors navigate the pressures of governmentality and neoliberal multiculturalism by creating identities and space for themselves in complex and often contradictory ways.

Keywords

International students, internationality, governmentality, neoliberal multiculturalism, precarity, racialization

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