Anthropology

International undergraduate students are increasingly sought after by North American universities as sources of revenue and as marketable exemplars of “the global”. This presentation presents results from a collaborative project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that examined the fraught encounter between a university eager for fee paying students in an age of state cutbacks, and undergraduate students from South Korea and China. It examines how such migration reveals fissures in notions of the global, and how relations with co-ethnic graduate students and Asian Americans mediated such students’ experiences abroad.