Hannah Soong

The scale of international student mobility continues to grow despite the impact of the global pandemic and the volatile geopolitical landscape in recent years (Mu and Soong 2025). The critical mas...

The study of international student resilience is of paramount psychological, political, and sociological significance. To date, however, no comprehensive mapping of the existing research on this topic has been undertaken. In response, our systematic literature review screened 5,635 publications retrieved from more than 80 databases and analyzed the 66 most relevant studies in-depth. We examined the contextual, conceptual, methodological, and empirical complexities of international student resilience through a concerted inductive–deductive approach to descriptive and thematic analysis. This examination was initially grounded in psychological theories of resilience, particularly the conceptual triad of challenges, facilitators, and positive outcomes, as well as the protective, compensatory, and challenge models. We then extended and problematized this psychological orientation by incorporating political and sociological debates on individual responsibilization and social justice, alongside engagement with the multi-Rs sociological model of resilience. Building on this review, we propose an interdisciplinary, multilayered model that serves as a heuristic for studying international student resilience and resilience more broadly, across empirical, conceptual, real, and ideological levels.

Biesta curates a constellation of voices across South and North contexts and reflects on the shifting meaning of publicness in education. In an age where public institutions are increasingly under pressure, from market logics, populist politics, and global inequalities: the question of education’s role in sustaining or reinventing the public sphere becomes urgent. Rather than take for granted what “the public” means, this work invites readers to consider how it is formed, who is included, and through what educational processes it is imagined and enacted. This is not a conversation about justice in the It is grounded in lived histories, positionalities, and geopolitical tensions. The contributors bring together perspectives from different parts of the world, exploring how the idea of public education is entangled with colonial legacies, democratic aspirations, and the realities of economic and epistemic injustice. The dialogue between South and North is not structured as a comparison, but as a relational encounter—one that opens space for mutual interrogation, discomfort, and learning. Writing collectively allows the contributors to explore the fragile work of publicness as an educational project. It is not merely a space or domain, but a verb: a doing and undoing, sustained through attention, dialogue, and responsibility. The text is marked by its commitment to critical listening, resisting the temptation to resolve the tensions it surfaces. Rather than mapping solutions, the piece gestures toward publicness as an unfinished, collective experiment—one that education must continually help to renew. In this way, it offers not only a critique of educational retrenchment, but a proposition: that philosophy, when done in solidarity and conversation, remains one of the most vital resources we have for imagining a more just and inclusive public life.

Since its online publication on 16 January 2025, Scapegoating international students for the rental crisis? Insights from large-scale evidence (2017–2024) in Australia has attracted significant attention and sparked widespread discussion. Among the responses is Kault’s critique, Erroneous regression used to associate higher international student numbers with lower rents . As our publication continues to generate impact, Kault’s critique is a welcome contribution, opening an intellectual avenue for scholarly debate, and providing an opportunity for us to reiterate viewpoints already made in the original publication and to offer necessary clarifications and further elaborations. In this response, we begin by recapitulating our study, followed by a summary of Kault’s critique and the assumptions embedded in its allegations. We then address Kault’s methodological challenges while drawing insights from established theses and existing studies to inform our rebuttal. We conclude by inviting the use of the reflexive tool of viewpoint , which enables critical and productive engagement with competing evidence and contrasting perspectives.

This chapter attends to refugee parental aspiration and its impacts on the educational outcomes of their children in Australia. Refugee parents in this research value education as the source of hope for their children's future and a better life. However, not all parents of refugee backgrounds understand the significant role they play in their children's education because their pre-settlement voices were often omitted and marginalised. Building on a research project that explores intergenerational refugee aspirations, key features of refugee parental aspirations are identified. They highlight the important role refugee parents and communities play in their child's education and future possibilities. This means that the work of parental aspiration should be foregrounded because they are valued as knowledge producers and agents of their own learning, parenting, and engagement in their child's education. It concludes that for refugee children to succeed, the voices of the refugee parents should not be marginalised.

Traditional international student destinations in the West are grappling with the thorny issue of rental crisis. In this challenging context for all, international students are caught within the political whims that blame them for the crisis. In this paper, we draw on large-scale evidence from Australia — including data collected at 76 time points from 2017 to 2023 at the national level and 79 time points from 2017 to 2024 at the capital city level — to investigate the statistical relationship between international student numbers and rental costs for local residents, while accounting for vacancy rate and rental inflation. Our findings challenge the politicised connection between international student numbers and rental costs. This study, the first of its kind in Australia and among the most recent internationally, makes a significant contribution by providing an evidence-grounded rebuttal against scapegoating international students for the rental crisis. It also enriches the emerging literature on international student housing, which we frame as part of a broader problematic termed “international studentification”. We caution against politicising international students in Australia and beyond, inviting future research to explore alternative pathways to establish a more just policy environment that enacts social and housing equity.