Resumen de Campus, City, Networks and Nation: Student-Migrant Activism as Socio-spatialExperience in Melbourne, Australia
‘Education–migration nexus’ policies in Australia between 1998 and 2010 linkedinternational education with different forms of temporary and permanent migration.This resulted in a blurring of boundaries around student, worker, consumer, migrantand ethnic identities. While the exploitation, marginalization and vulnerability ofinternational students in Australia has gained a great deal of media and scholarlyattention, less consideration has been given to the varied forms of subsequent protestundertaken by student migrants in Australian cities. This article analyses three casestudies of protests involving student migrants in Melbourne: a protest against unfairassessment; a fight for a campus prayer room; and labour protests within the retailservice and taxi industries. It draws on theoretical work on new social movements andsocial transformation in urban spaces to find ways to conceptualize this activism inrelation to the scales of campus, city and nation. In doing so, it argues primarily thatthese sites of protest are socio-spatial experiences that encompass shifting and sociallyproduced spatial scales, as well as complex networks of association across differentcommunities, which in turn reflect different student-migrant identities.
