Crossing A Broad Divide: Enacting Educational Mobility Justice in Study Abroad

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the study abroad experiences of minoritized first-generation, low-income students who are largely absent in literature, and whose lives are shaped by historical, institutional, systematic, and societal dynamics that require unpacking. In this study I acknowledge that historically, minoritized communities have different histories of mobility and immobility. By contextualizing study abroad as an act of mobility, this research project situates study abroad from a Critical Race Theory and Mobility Justice framework to highlight the differentiated histories of mobility that helped shape study abroad participation. Differential mobilities for minoritized first-generation, low-income students revealed the varied experiences and participant histories that illustrate the discursive and systemic bases of (im)mobility that generate unjust power relations. Through participant counternarratives, I find that students’ differentiated mobilities affect and influence their mobility imaginaries, possibilities of travel, and their narrations of identity abroad. I conceptualize an educational mobility justice framework to examine how marginalized study abroad participants experience differential mobilities prior to study abroad, how these mobility inequalities impact their ability to even imagine themselves as participants, and how immobility, discursive and structural, obstructs and shapes study abroad participation.