International Doctoral Students’ Navigations of Identity and Belonging in a Globalizing University

Introduction Individuals pursuing doctoral degrees face a changing landscape in which pathways into and through doctoral education and subsequent career options have become more complex, marketdriven, and globally contextual (Marginson & van der Wende, 2007; Nerad, 2010; Rizvi & Lingard, 2009). Today's doctoral students and new PhD graduates are confronted with negotiating global possibilities, responsibilities, opportunities, and challenges that are fundamentally different from those of a generation ago. This may especially be the case for the thousands of individuals who become international doctoral students. While universities in the United States and the U.K. have long attracted large numbers of international doctoral students, new and high-quality doctoral programs are now becoming well-established in alternative destinations, such as Australia, Korea, China, the E.U., Canada, and other locales. Travel paths for students across borders to obtain doctoral education have become more diverse, and most large research universities have become more cosmopolitan, globally interlinked, and highly multicultural in their student populations (Marginson & van der Wende, 2007). This trend is indicative of larger processes of globalization, including the vast advances in transportation and communications technology, which have blurred the lines between nation-states and given rise to what has been termed "transnational space" (Jackson, Crang, & Dwyer, 2004). The prefix trans- contains meanings of "across", "beyond", "through", or "so as to change," giving the word transnational the connotation of a space that sits above national localities, that goes beyond linkages of bordered states, and in fact changes the meaning and relevance of national borders. It is not a sum of one place and another, but a dynamic transactional environment. Transnational space evokes a sense of "movement between". Universities, while obviously grounded in a national locality, increasingly function as such transnational spaces, as they cultivate highly internationalized student enrolments and multi-national research consortia. As cosmopolitan sojourners, international doctoral students occupy this transnational space where their field of activity consists of simultaneous locations--at minimum their home country and the country in which they are studying, and possibly other locales of research, activism and professional work as well (Gargano, 2009; Rizvi, 2010). Large-scale survey data about student mobility, student satisfaction with their educational experiences, and post-PhD career trajectories has provided broad outlines of how doctoral education is evolving in a global context. Yet the voices of doctoral students, both domestic and international, have been largely absent from attempts to understand the complex influences of globalization on doctoral education. Little is known about how students themselves are constructing and making meaning of their educational purposes, experiences, and identities in a world that is increasingly globally interconnected. This paper reports a segment of findings from a large research project that sought to understand the experiences of international doctoral students at a major research institution in Canada in relation to broader processes of globalization. In particular, it sought to understand how immersion in the transnational space of a globalized university influenced international doctoral students' senses of identity and belonging. Doctoral study, especially internationally, is by design, a transitory experience (Kashyap, 2011) during which international doctoral students are in a period of profound transition, maneuvering between "home" and abroad, between novice and expert, between education and career (Szelenyi, 2006). It was the interest of this study to explore transitions of identity and belongingness in this context. The site of the study, The University of British Columbia (UBC), served as an exemplar location within the globalized doctoral education field. …