Sophie Cranston

There is now copious research exploring youth drinking; however, since the early 2000s, an increasing number of young people are choosing to drink less (Oldham et al. 2018). The proportion of 16–24...

Using the case study of the children of British migrants who move to the United Kingdom for higher education, this chapter explores the narration of privilege amongst a group of migrants who are popularly seen as privileged. To do this, the chapter develops Worth’s (2021) conceptual framing of having, being, and doing privilege, alongside common ways through which privilege is researched in migration studies: mobilities, lifestyles, identity markers, categorisations, and capitals. The chapter uses this framework to explore the absences and presences of privilege in how migrants narrate their lives. The children of British migrants recognise that they have privilege through their mobility and lifestyles, but do not frame privilege through identity markers. Discussions of the ‘Third Culture Kid’ as a privileged identity categorisation show that these young people do not want to be identified as being privileged. There is similarly little recognition of how privilege reproduces itself through capitals. Collectively, this chapter develops a conceptual perspective on privilege by providing a framework through which to understand how privilege is narrated by those who are seen to possess it. This framework highlights a need to explore narratives of privilege as being multiple, spatial, and temporal.

This paper interrogates the historical construction of the ‘international student’ as a fee payer category in the United Kingdom, revealing its post-colonial roots and implications for contemporary...

Imposter participants are participants who falsely claim to meet inclusion criteria. They are an increasingly recognised issue in the interdisciplinary methods literature, an issue which has been exacerbated by the development of online research methods. This existing work recognises imposter participants as a frustration in the research process and provides important interventions that raise awareness and provide strategies of detection and prevention. However, this paper flips the dominant narrative in academia on fraudulent, imposter or ‘fake’ participants. Drawing on the authors' experience of imposter participants and Generative AI in online methods, this paper provides a series of ethical arguments around incentives, trust and power imbalances. The paper provides a critical lens through which to examine wider questions of trust in online research, making wider contributions to debates on research methods and ethics. Indeed, the paper argues that imposter participants raise urgent questions, not just for the validity and research integrity of individual projects, but for revealing wider structural inequalities and how to potentially navigate this going forward.

Research on highly skilled migration has challenged methodological individualism by emphasising the need to centre familial relationships in the understanding of migration. However, the resulting focus on the micro‐scale of the family unit negates an understanding of broader political‐economic discourses shaping everyday migrant lives. This paper demonstrates why research on highly skilled family migration needs to be placed in conversation with neoliberalism. Using a case study of Australian and British highly skilled migrant families moving through Singapore, the paper makes two contributions to research on migration. First, the paper develops the scope beyond that of the micro or macro‐scale into the missing meso‐scale analysis of highly skilled family migration. Second, the paper advances migration infrastructures as a conceptual approach to understand the meso‐level, contesting the previous methodological individualism by extending analyses of infrastructures to the family. Using examples of infrastructures of visas and international schools, the paper demonstrates that meso‐level infrastructures broker temporariness, transience and time insecurity as a condition of neoliberalism within the lives and mobilities of highly skilled family migrants.

Reflecting critically on 50 years of the Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British Geographers) (RGS‐IBG) Population Geography Research Group (PopGRG), and drawing on interviews with leading population geographers of the British Isles, this paper identifies defining features of Population Geography that attest to its longevity: personal connections and material production; fluidity and adaptability over time and through interdisciplinary contexts; and utility, vitality and relevance of the subdiscipline. We argue that continuation of care, material production and nimbleness can sustain the subdiscipline in the context of ongoing neoliberalisation across Higher Education. To remain vital, Population Geography must also decolonise and promote ‘population thinking’ to more boldly and critically attend to contemporary global challenges.

International student mobilities (ISM) is an important but increasingly complex and controversial topic. Politically, the contested nature of international student mobilities is driven by the confluence of immigration policies, increasing demand for global education, and new higher education funding imperatives. Academically, international student mobilities is a key field of study which intersects with three subdisciplines of geography: political, population and social. Our intervention reveals, for the first time, how current UK migration management policies are actively ‘producing’ the international student as a population category. We illustrate the effects of this production through its operationalisation into universities and everyday student lives. We achieve this by developing an analytical framework informed by theorisations of ‘dynamic nominalism’, which is complemented by data from semi‐structured interviews and policy documents. Our findings uncover the existence of multiple populations within the international student category, exposing the inherent complexities, hierarchies of privilege and contradictions therein. Notably, we identify a conceptual and empirical distinction between those produced as ‘international students’ based on their visa, and those produced as ‘international students’ via their tuition fee status. The implications of this intervention are important for the contentious landscape of higher education and immigration policy because the paper challenges assumptions about, and raises ethical questions regarding the treatment of, the ‘international student’. Our analytical framework also has wider applicability beyond the subject of ISM, through its potential to aid geographers, and those in cognate disciplines, concerned with addressing fundamental questions about how and why categories are produced and the consequences of this production.

Review of: The EU Migrant Generation in Asia: Middle-Class Aspirations in Asian Global Cities, Helena Hof (2022) Bristol: Bristol University Press, 264 pp., ISBN 978-1-52922-500-6, p/bk, £80

This article explores privilege in migration. Rather than focus on practices of privilege at micro-scales, the article examines how privilege in migration is ordered and disciplined through meso- and macro-level infrastructures (transnational organisations, higher education institutes, and governmental visa policies). The article questions where a pervasive discourse of mobility as achievement comes from and how it becomes materialised in the promotion and facilitation of forms of mobility. It argues that privilege in mobility becomes disciplined through neoliberal discourses of globalisation that idealise mobility as cosmopolitanism, whilst simultaneously producing this as an elite subject positioning.