Mobility and desire: international students and Asian regionalism in aspirational Singapore

Abstract

Higher education is playing an important role in Singapore's most recent cycle of modernization: to re-make itself into a global city through the continued accumulation of capital, ‘talent,’ and knowledge. This paper is a critical analysis of the accounts of a group of international students enrolled at the National University of Singapore, a key strategic site in Singapore's bid to reconfigure itself into a knowledge hub. We discuss international student negotiations of Singapore's global city imaginings against a policy context that foregrounds a desire for regional students in the state's imagination and aspiration. In inquiring what political work international education is called upon to do to further Singapore's progressive developmentalism, we open up an analytical space for understanding the global city as both a cosmopolitan metropolis that is continually being refashioned by the desires and aspirations of new student actors, and a place of transit from which students leave having acquired valuable navigational capacities.