Lancaster University - Department of Sociology Temporary Sojourns in the Periphery Partners of International Students in Lancaster, United Kingdom Thesis resubmitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), by DipL-Soz. Elisabeth Claudia Grindel, in December 2012. ProQuest Number: 11003439 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 11003439 Published by ProQuest LLC(2018). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 Declaration I hereby declare that this thesis is ray own work, and has not been submitted in substantially the same form for the award of a higher degree elsewhere. This thesis is re-submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD). Elisabeth Claudia Grindel n Abstract DipL-Soz. Elisabeth Claudia Grindel Thesis ‘Temporary Sojourns in the Periphery - Partners of International Students in Lancaster, United Kingdom ’ submitted for the degree of Doctor o f Philosophy (PhD) in September 2011; re-submission in December 2012. This thesis reports the findings of a qualitative research project on partners of international students in Lancaster, United Kingdom, a place selected as an example of the many peripheral university cities affected by the growth in international student migration. The experiences of these voluntary, temporary, mostly highly skilled migrants differ from accounts of other mobile people and have so far been largely ignored in the literature. This is a lack that this thesis fills. Drawing on diverse bodies of migration literature as well as on semi-structured interviews, I explore these migrants’ experiences concerning employment, home, social networking and network support whilst they reside in Lancaster. I show that these ‘immobilised mobile’ people have to rely on the local, restricted, labour market in their search for employment and that they invest a huge amount of emotional labour for the creation of a ‘diasporic intimacy’ which is important for the formation of an ‘intimate diasporic space’ in the home. I further discuss their attempts to form meaningful social networks at the place of relocation and their work on maintaining relations abroad. I explore also how these migrants can feel in or out of place at the new setting. in Acknowledgements This doctoral thesis would not have been possible without the support I received from those who helped me to complete this project. First of all, I am heartily thankful to my primary supervisor, Anne-Marie Fortier, for her encouragement, supervision, and support from the preliminary to the concluding stage. I also thank my secondary supervisor,Nayanika Mookherjee , for being an important part of this project for three years. A special thanks goes to my participants for sharing their experiences with ire, as without their openness this thesis would have only been based on theoretical work. I am also grateful to my two previous employers, the Lancaster University Sociology Department, which enabled me to gain important experience teaching undergraduate students whilst earning a living, and the Gregson Arts and Community Centre for understanding my need for flexible employment. I am thankful to my current employer, Kaplan International Colleges (KIC), for allowing me to participate at conferences and for supporting me throughout the final stages of writing my thesis. I also want to thank my friend Noel Cass for his editorial work and my editor Barbara Ardinger for her fruitful suggestions. I am thankful to my parents, Claudia Weise and Hans-Jorg Grindel , and their spouses, Matthias Weise and Cornelia Rost, as well as my partner Tim Den by for their moral and financial support. Finally, I thank my friends both in Lancaster and across the globe for encouraging me over the last six years. IV Contents List of Figures VII List of Tables VIII Introduction 1 Partners of International Students: Privileged Transnational Migrants? 9 Thesis Structure 11 Chapter one: Theorising Migrating Partners 13 Transnational Families and Network Support 13 Spouses of Corporate Expatriates 23 Spouses of International Students in North America 34 Conclusion: Life in a Transnational Bubble 39 Chapter two: International Student Migration to the UK 45 The History of Student Migration into the UK 47 Internationalisation and the Europeanisation of Higher Education: The Bologna Process 58 Conclusion: The Changing Image of an International Student 62 Chapter three: Methodology, Setting and Sample 66 Introducing Methodology and Methods 79 Introducing the Sample 93 Limitations of Data Collection 101 Chapter four: Experiences in the Local Labour Market 106 Seeking to Enter the Local Labour Market 114 Deskilling: A Possible Way Out of Unemployment? 118 Spatial Mobility: A Possible Way Out of Unemployment? 125 V Conclusion: Disappointment or Cruel Optimism? 129 Chapter five: Home in a Transnational Context 137 Homemaking and Diasporic Intimacy 149 Emotional Domestic Labour: The Creation of the Taste of Home 163 Conclusion: Home as an Intimate Diasporic Space 177 Chapter six: Kin and Friendship Networks 183 Friendship: New Relations in Lancaster 188 ‘Keeping in Touch’: Relations within Transnational Kin Networks 204 Conclusion: Network Support on Different Scales 211 Chapter seven: Feeling In or Out of Place: 215 ‘What’s class got to do with it?’ - Brendan 222 ‘Just a visitor’ -Cecilia 228 ‘Fear of Islamophobia’ — AH 234 Conclusion: Familiar and Stranger ‘Space Invaders’ 240 Conclusion and Future Research 247 Migrating Partners and the Transnational Bubble 248 Cruel Optimism and the Intimate Diasporic Space 257 Immobilised Mobiles and Privilege 261 Partners of International Students in a Changing Higher Education System 266 Bibliography 271 VI List of Figures 1 Total Numbers of Incoming Students1998/1999-2007/2008 55 2 Lancaster on the UK Map 69 3 Age Pyramid - Census 2001 - Lancaster District 72 4 Socio-Demographic Questionnaire 86 5 Laura's Casket of Magic 155 6 Chun's Casket of Magic 156 7 Banners on Chun's College Accommodation Door 158 8 Anna's Mermaids 159 9 Daniels Sola 160 10 Daniels Wine Glasses 161 11 Laura's Armchair 162 12 Cecilia's Kitchen 167 13 Heike's Bread Maker 169 14 Chun’s Dried Fruits 171 15 Anna's Coflfee Maker 172 VII List of Tables 1 Basic Socio-Demographic Data 95 2 Educational Level and Occupation of Interviewee and the International Student’s Affiliation at Lancaster University 96 3 Length of Stay, Area of Living and Mode of Financing 97 VIE Introduction This thesis examines the experiences of partners of international postgraduate students at Lancaster University, selected as an exemplifying case for the growing number of small, peripheral university cities affected by a rise in international student migration.1 These individuals are relatively privileged, temporary, transnational migrants who cross national boundaries for a shorter or longer period of time. The motivation for their migration is their desire for close proximity to their partners, the international students. Until now, research on accompanying partners of students had been largely ignored in the literature, a gap that this thesis fills. Earlier writings on asimilar group of migrants in the U.S. and Canada (de Verthelyi, 1995; 1996; Kim, 2006; 2010; Plett Martens and Peter Grant, 20072) refer to these migrants as ‘spouses of international students’. I prefer ‘partners’, as, at the time of the interview, not all of my informants were married. The usage of ‘partner’ includes both married and unmarried informants. Concerning visa regulations, it is vital to mention that all non-EU participants had to be married in order to gain access to the dependants’ visa, whereas EU participants were able to cross borders within the EU without marriage certificates. There are many ways in which we could consider this group of migrants within migration studies. I think they fit best, although not exclusively, into the literature of transnationalism. As they are relatively highly-skilled migrants, with the majority of them holding at least one tertiary qualification, in this introduction I situate the research in the field of ‘privileged’ transnational migration. In chapter one, I specifically situate this thesis in the field of transnational families and network support. These two fields offer useful insights, but my participants do not exclusively 1 I return to the setting in chapter three. 2 1 return to these studies in chapter one. fit in either of these categories. In subsequent chapters, I therefore introduce other bodies of literature that are relevant to more specific issues that each chapter addresses. In this introductory chapter, I first give a brief overview of literature on ‘privileged’ migratioa Second, I show that, although so for largely ignored in relevant literature, the partners of international students in my study are indeed part of this emerging group of migrants. Third, I outline the chapters of this thesis. Gunther Beyer (1981: 96) claims that the twentieth century has been called the ‘century of the homeless man’, a characteristic that becomes even more evident in the twenty-first century. Although migration has always been part of human history, its growth in volume and its significance have risen since the end of the Second World War and most particularly since the 1980s, which leads authors to call the current time the ‘age of migration’ (Castles and Miller, 2003). To migrants, the United Kingdom has traditionally played an exceptional role as an English-speaking country and as head of the former British Empire. In 2007, the year of my study, nearly 600,000 migrants entered the UK on a temporary or permanent basis (Dobson, Latham and Salt, 2008).