This opening chapter of the book examines key theoretical ideas about âpolicy as powerâ and as âdiscursive practiceâ. It aims to show how, through policies, a hegemonic system of power relations can be established and to highlight the fact that key issues affecting inclusion and equality of international students are mostly systemic. To support this argument, the chapter cites research evidence which shows that even in situations when attempts to create an alternative âdiscursive practiceâ are made by international students, these attempts still engender actions, interpretations and subjectivities of students that feed, rather than challenge, the hegemonic system of policy and regulatory frameworks that âdetermineâ international studentsâ lives in the country of education. By extension, drawing on the same theoretical ideas, the chapter also posits that epistemic democratisation of university classrooms based on inclusion of international studentsâ knowledges as equals will only start when it is ârecommendedâ by policies and officially âmeasuredâ through university rankings. The chapter begins to highlight the potential contribution of the TEF in this area.
Policy is power. Through policies, various stakeholder intentions are realised, which reflect planned rationality to, for instance, reinforce the status quo, when things are going well (or when it is politically convenient to keep them as they are), or to legitimate new authority, when a specific need for change has been identified. Policy making therefore cannot be separated from politics, as public policies always reflect the view of the state on a particular issue and in that sense, are a vehicle for accomplishment of specific goals which are related to this view. Thus, policies set agendas, generate ways forward and lay out guidelines for adoption of particular proposals. Through such roles, they function as power and become a framework for acting and governing. These functions of policies have been theorised by Foucault (1969, printed in English in 2002) and more contemporary analysts of his work (e.g. Bacchi and Bonham 2014) as âdiscursive practiceâ, mainly intending to denote an effect of policies on producing specific types of knowledge (discourse) and the work they do (practice). This understanding of âdiscursive practiceâ, whether developed directly via Foucaultâs theorisations or not, have been used in policy studies to shape our understanding of distributive impacts of policy on organisations and individuals, rationales underlying them and consequences for creating educational inequalities (e.g. Fischer 2003; Taylor 2004; Zembylas 2005; Ball 2012; Thomson et al. 2013). In short, policies functioning as âdiscursive practicesâ set the âtruthâ and then shape our responses to that âtruthâ, because they permit some actions, prohibit others, and most importantly for the arguments developed later on in the chapter, rationalise new ones. Foucault (2002) explains such policy effects in the following way:
The conditions necessary for the appearance of an object of discourse [here international students], the historical conditions required if one is to âsay anythingâ about it, and if several people are to say different things about it, the conditions necessary if it is to exist in relation to other objects, if it is to establish with them relations of resemblance, proximity, difference, distance, transformation, (âŠ) these conditions are many and imposing. Which means that one cannot speak of anything at any time. It is not easy to say something new, it is not enough for us to open our eyes and to pay attention, or to be aware, for new objects to suddenly to light up and emerge from the ground. But this difficulty is not only a negative one, it must not be attached to some obstacle whose power appears to be, exclusively, to blind, to hinder, to prevent discovery (âŠ) the object [still] exists under the positive conditions of a complex group of relations. These relations are established between institutions, economic and social processes, behavioural patters, systems of norms, types of classification and modes of characterisation that are not present in the object (âŠ) [but rather] in the field of exteriority. (Foucault 2002, pp. 49â50)
Such theorisations would therefore seem to suggest that in order for us to âsay something newâ about international students, something that could act as an effective âcounterweightâ to the current policy representations of international students that legitimate their subordination (explained in Chapter 2), there has to be a new âexteriorityâ, in the form of a fresh policy discourse. Such discourse could then create avenues for saying new things about international students and, as already alluded to in the introduction, for opening home studentsâ eyes to the intellectual benefits international mobility can offer to them. As explained by Foucault (2002), objects themselves cannot enable new things to be said about them, rather, it is policy (as exteriority) that has the power of enabling these things to be said and for a new reality to come into being. It is in those terms that policy functions as discursive practice, which is contingent on the sense-making of âinfluentialâ individuals who can drive decisions to create possibilities for a new status, social and educational privileges and representations of âothersâ in society (e.g. Foucault 2002). Functioning as discursive practice, policies can therefore dictate behaviours that âinstall new regimes of truthâ (Bacchi and Bonham 2014, p. 177). That is why they are called âdiscursive practiceâ and not merely a âdiscourseâ because their meaning encloses whole systems of thought, guidance for this thought and subsequent actions, which permit what consequently happens in real life (Bacchi and Bonham 2014).
The history surrounding the things that are said about an object is also important (Foucault 2002). That is why rationales behind internationalisation in Britain are reviewed through historical and socio-political lenses in Chapter 2. This review highlights that ways in which policies act as power are not merely a matter of saying something about somebody else, but are rather linked to the total package that includes not only what is said but also how what is said is justified to be âtrueâ and which political, historical and social aspects of the context can be drawn upon to understand why it is justified in this way. As argued by Young (1987, cited in Bacchi and Bonham 2014, p. 178), understanding discursive practice is
not simply that which was thought or said per se, but all the discursive rules and categories that were a priori, assumed as a constituent part of discourse and therefore of knowledge. (Young 1987, p. 48)
Chapter 2 unravels key political and historical parts of the discourse surrounding international students, to reveal how knowledge about them in the British society has come about. These parts are also critiqued to understand the basis on which it was possible to say certain âthingsâ about international studentsâthat is, how things said could be in the âtrueâ (Foucault 2002). This book therefore provides important understandings of what kind of social and especially educational âlivesâ the knowledge about international students has created for them and how policy has functioned over the years as the dominant power in the creation of these lives.
To understand the role of policy in creating lives for people, it is important to position âpolicyâ itself as a subject of study and exploration. The nature and scope of things that are said about individuals in policies has an undeniable socio-cultural dimension which, as already alluded to above, reflects a governmentâs âtakeâ on an issue. That is why the nature and scope of these things need to be explored. Questions about its sources and rationales need to be asked, to understand not only how specific representations of, for instance, international students have come about, but also what implications these representations might have for their participation and inclusion in the country of education. This simultaneously means trying to understand the governmentâs thinking behind ways in which they believe order should be maintained and how specific âtypesâ of individuals, such as international students, will presumably âlive within and abide by the rulesâ that are produced in policies to set this order (Bacchi 2009, p. ix). Bacchi (2009) argues that developing this understanding could be done through an approach to policy analysis that focuses on unpicking âWhatâs the problem represented to be?â (WPR). This approach is used throughout the book for two reasons: firstly, to help bring to bear understandings of ways in which policies related to internationalisation have so far âdeterminedâ the lives of international students in the UK, and secondly, and by extension, to support some of the key arguments that are made in the book about the need for new policies, such as the TEF, to include specific metrics on internationalisation that can bring about changes in these lives.
The WPR approach is discussed in more detail a bit later in this chapter. But here it is worth citing some research findings which suggest that even in situations whereby international students establish for themselves alternative ways of being, for example, through some emotional responses to the reality created for them by regulatory frameworks of policies, these alternative ways are not strong enough to âcombatâ the disadvantaging effects of policies. Such findings further support the notion that policy is power.
I have argued elsewhere that subjectivities of student interpretations of their situation in the country of education, while making international students âfeel betterâ on a personal level, can never counter-act the powerful master processes of discrimination organised for them through policies (Hayes 2018). The data I had collected as part of the research on the types of discrimination international students were experiencing in the country of education have shown that, whilst students were able to create positive emotions for themselves when they, for instance, experienced racism, and that these emotions helped them to cope with the effects of abuse they were experiencing, they at the same time became an additional function of discriminatory forces originally instituted by legal and structural dimensions of the social and educational domains in which the students were interacting. The emotions that were present in the students who took part in the research, such as self-comforting that the abuse they were experiencing was soon going to be over as their studies were coming to an end, indeed became another âtypeâ of discursive practice. This type of discursive practice however further fed into the reality already established by policies, as the emotions that were evoked in the students did not prompt them to take any action against the discrimination they were experiencing. Instead, the students were subsumed by these emotions into accepting discrimination and engendered actions, performances and interpretations that further marginalised their already marginalised status in the country of education.
The sample excerpts from international students that are cited below show ways in which the students in the research established a new reality for themselves through some unspoken interpretations of the microaggressions they were experiencing. These interpretations were evoked when they were struggling for acceptance and access to the same social and educational benefits as the home students, and when they were looking for ways to manage the sense of self through creating self-imaginaries of self and who they were for the country of education. Importantly, these self-imaginaries were different from the understandings of who the international students were for the country of education which had been shaped by official international policies. But even more importantly, they were not sufficient to contraindicate the negative effects of the latter, as it is the latter that had âpowerâ of deciding who they were, through being attached to the system that was difficult to challenge by personal âcoping strategiesâ.
Thus, a common strategy among international students, for instance, was to remain âinvisibleâ, even if that meant being perceived as academically unsuccessful. This fed the existing perceptions of international students as âinferiorâ, created to a large extent by national policies and public discourses which, traditionally, have shaped views that differing learning behaviours of international students need to be corrected to study in the prestigious British education system ...