University Students as Migrants: A New History of Educational Mobility in Western Europe, 1960s–1980s

• Antragstellerin: Professorin Isabella Löhr, Ph.D.
• Fachliche Zuordnung: Neuere und Neueste Geschichte (einschl. Europäische Geschichte der Neuzeit und Außereuropäische Geschichte)
• Förderung: Förderung seit 2024
• Projektkennung: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Projektnummer 547530385

This project connects student mobility to changing migration policies and discourses in Western Europe, covering the period from the 1960s to the 1980s. In doing so, it offers fresh insights into the development and transformation of selective migration regimes and the ways their target constituencies experienced them. From the nineteenth century, mobile students constituted a distinct category of migrants because of their ambivalent status. On the one hand, their academic and social backgrounds meant that they were often perceived as cultural ambassadors, educational elites and leaders-in-the-making, rather than as objects of migration policy. Policymakers in both sender and recipient countries treated them as vessels for knowledge transfer, modernization processes or projections of 'soft power' - considerations that also underpinned the creation of various international scholarship schemes. However, from the 1960s onwards, these favorable perceptions contrasted with tightening migration policies in Western Europe, resulting in selective migration regimes and categorizations for legal, illegal, welcome and unwanted migration. This project investigates the relationship between restrictive migration policies in Western Europe and schemes that facilitated the transnational mobility of students. Moreover, it shows how such mobility intersected with other forms of migration (such as flight, exile and labor migration) and considers the impact on students who often faced issues that shaped migrant experiences more broadly, from the navigation of visa bureaucracies to personal encounters with racism, xenophobia and discrimination. The project integrates Belgium, France, West Germany and the United Kingdom into one analytical framework, while also setting Western European developments in relation to comparable or contrasting mobilities to North America and to the state-socialist countries in Eastern Europe. Drawing on sources from national archives, international institutions, universities and non-governmental organizations, the project combines comparative, international and transnational perspectives. By tracing the shifting policies towards, and experiences of, international students across three decades, the project connects phenomena that so far have been treated separately in the academic literature. Moreover, it shows how the politics of student mobility translated broader geopolitical constellations - such as Cold War politics, decolonization and European integration - into mobility patterns in ways that have not yet been fully acknowledged. This collaborative project will result in a co-authored monograph, journal publications as well as knowledge exchange activities with present-day student organizations. As a whole, it makes a pioneering contribution to our understanding of migration regimes, the categorizations of mobility and the genealogy of migration discourses.

• DFG-Verfahren: Sachbeihilfen
• Internationaler Bezug: Großbritannien
• Partnerorganisation: Arts and Humanities Research Council
• Kooperationspartner: Dr. Daniel Laqua