Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper explores the cosmopolitan imaginaries within the context of Vietnam’s internationalisation of higher education. The study examines lecturers' perceptions at public universities and their visions of global citizenship within the framework of international integration.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the cosmopolitan imaginaries within the context of Vietnam’s internationalisation of higher education. The study examines lecturers' perceptions at public universities and their visions of global citizenship within the framework of international integration. Following Delanty’s (2006, 2009) approach, cosmopolitan imagination is investigated to understand global openness rather than the Western model of cosmopolitan universalism. Additionally, I am interested in neoliberal imaginaries that continue to frame cosmopolitanism in economic terms (Rizvi, 2009). It shows that internationalisation in Vietnam has become commercialised, with international programmes or degrees imported from English-speaking countries, often considered an important step towards integrating students into global citizenship communities. The research reveals the dominance of a cosmopolitan vision aligned with the state-led, formal discourse on human capital for global competitiveness and efficiency, intensified by its vision of modernisation and industrialisation. There are also tensions associated with this vision, which are disproportionately internalised by individuals, exacerbating existing disparities based on gender, economic status, education, and urban/rural backgrounds.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Digital nomadism reveals how digital disruption reconfigures power, mobility, and inequality in North-South relations. This paper uses a critical migration studies lens to decentre nomadism and explore its impacts on host communities, development futures, and mobility justice.

Paper long abstract

Amid profound global uncertainty and accelerating digital disruption, digital nomadism has emerged as a celebrated symbol of borderless work and innovation. Yet this mobility also exposes deep tensions in how development, inequality, and agency are imagined. This paper reframes digital nomadism as a privileged form of North-South migration, arguing that its rise demands a rethinking of development itself in relation to shifting power relations and contested futures. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico, Malaysia, Thailand, Italy, and the UAE, the paper employs a critical migration studies lens to decentre dominant narratives of freedom and digital entrepreneurship. The analysis traces digital nomadism across macro, meso, and micro scales: (1) macro-colonial legacies and neoliberal development agendas that render the Global South a site for consumption, experimentation, and flexible work; (2) meso-mobility regimes, digital infrastructures, and racialized border practices that selectively enable elite mobility while deepening exclusion for others; (3) micro-the lived experiences of host communities confronting rent inflation, labour precarity, cultural displacement, and emergent forms of protest, such as Mexico City’s recent anti-nomad mobilisations. By foregrounding these interconnected dynamics, the paper argues that digital nomadism illuminates the limits of dominant development paradigms that valorise digital innovation while obscuring structural inequality. It shows how communities challenge these dynamics through acts of resistance, solidarity economies, and demands for more just urban and mobility futures. In doing so, the paper contributes to reimagining development beyond conventional binaries and toward more equitable, accountable, and decolonial visions of collective wellbeing.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines Kenyan women studying in Shanghai and how Chinese language learning shapes cosmopolitan imaginaries through South–South mobility. Based on ethnography, it shows how education, gender, and racialized encounters produce situated forms of world belonging beyond Western models.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how cosmopolitan imaginaries are formed, negotiated, and constrained through South–South educational mobility by focusing on Kenyan women studying in Shanghai amid China–Africa cooperation. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic observations, it follows Kenyan women as they move between Shanghai, Nairobi, and Eldoret, tracing how their experiences as Chinese-language learners shape both their educational trajectories and subsequent roles as interpreters and cultural mediators in Kenya. In Shanghai, these women encounter heterogeneous social interactions: racialized gazes, misrecognition, and online hostility coexist with moments of friendship, cooperation, and cross-cultural openness. Their assessments of what “counts” as racism do not converge but range from critical sensitivity to strategic disregard, producing reflexive and situational ways of relating to difference. The paper shows how African students continually negotiate their positions between expectations of “opportunity,” “development,” and “internationalization,” and lived hierarchies, exclusion, and inequality.

Rather than fostering a singular or normative cosmopolitan identity, these experiences give rise to a pragmatic and relational form of cosmopolitan imagination grounded in everyday encounters. Chinese language learning plays a central role in this process. As a form of cultural capital, it enables these women to negotiate tensions between patriarchal social expectations and personal aspirations, expand their capacity for mobility, and reconfigure their modes of self-expression and agency. By situating Shanghai as a non-Western global city, the paper argues that South–South educational mobility offers an alternative entry into the world that neither reproduces Western cosmopolitan ideals nor fully escapes new hierarchies and exclusions.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper critiques how remittances from Filipino nurses in Finland subsidize global care extraction. We reveal a paradox: these funds alleviate Philippine state pressures while locking migrants into deskilled roles, perpetuating inequality through a constrained cosmopolitan mobility.

Paper long abstract

The Philippines, constructed as a global “empire of care,” systematically educates nurses for export, a practice rooted in postcolonial debt and economic strategy. Finland, facing elder care deficits, has actively recruited from this reserve since 2009. This paper shares findings from a project tracing the transnational political economy of this migration corridor. It critically investigates bilateral remittance flows, treating them not as neutral monetary transfers but as core social relations within extractive economies.

The paper argues that remittances subsidize and perpetuate systemic inequalities in the corridor. While they alleviate pressure on the Philippine state to generate domestic jobs or raise health sector wages, they simultaneously lock migrant nurses into deskilled positions in Finland to meet familial financial obligations. This dynamic exemplifies a constrained cosmopolitan imaginary, where global mobility is necessitated by, and perpetuates, asymmetric development.

Adopting a multi-scalar “follow-the-money” methodology, the analysis connects micro-level migrant remittance practices (via a survey of n=200 nurses) with meso-level household interviews (n=20) in the Philippines, examining fund usage and transformed family dynamics. This is contextualized within a macro-level political economy analysis of Philippine dependency. Framed by critical postcolonial and heterodox economics, the paper positions remittances as integral to the architecture of global care extraction. It ultimately explores how the cosmopolitan imagination of migrant nurses is shaped by and negotiates this extractive political economy, moving beyond Western-centric models to reveal a landscape of constrained world openness.