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This paper employs narrative research methods to provide new theoretical and empirical insights into the role of individual agency in student migration. The paper begins with a theoretical exploration of agency in international migration, broadly conceived, and applies this to student migration specifically. This exploration emphasizes the strengths of a life-course perspective in analyzing the role of individual agency in student-migration journeys, as this perspective is sensitive to temporality. Following this approach, the paper offers a novel theoretical framework for analyzing student-migration, drawing on Emirbayer & Mische's (Emirbayer and Mische, American Journal of Sociology 103:962-1023, 1998) 'chordal triad' model of agency, and presents analysis of 18-months of narrative data collection with 26 international student-migrants in the UK and Japan. Interview data demonstrate how three agentive orientations--habit, imagination, and judgment--are each associated with specific tactics that individuals can use to navigate the challenging terrain of their student migration trajectories. Participants also exhibited changing agentive orientations over time. The results of this analysis indicate that the role of agency is dynamic within the education-migration nexus, changing in relation to: (1) the evolving relationship between individual student-migrants and their contexts, and (2) the simultaneous evolution of each individual's life-course project. In summary, while student-migrants are influenced by context, they also exhibit the capacity to evolve and adapt agentively in the pursuit of their goals.

Taking the UK and Japan as contrasting national case studies, this article supplements existing research into student migration by consolidating a regulatory perspective with individual narrative accounts. Reported here are the results of a mixed-methods two-phase study. Phase 1 is a concerted trajectory analysis of student migration policy in the UK and Japan from 2004 to 2018, while phase 2 draws on biographical-narrative interviews with 26 student-migrants. The paper reveals tangible effects of the receptivity, stability, and transparency of regulatory frameworks in student-migrants' trajectories, while also demonstrating that seemingly receptive regulatory environments do not necessarily equate to smooth and risk-free post-study transitions.

The ongoing pandemic has affected all aspects of human life globally. Universities have faced significant challenges in continuing their educational and research activities while at the same time becoming more visible due to their work on identifying treatments, developing vaccines, understanding the impact of the pandemic and exploring the ways of recovering from the crisis. English universities have been at the forefront of these global efforts and have had unique opportunities to contribute, and demonstrate their contribution, to the common good. This study is the first of its kind to offer an analysis of the new empirical material on how English universities have dealt with the pandemic from the perspective of the common good. It also offers a new, literature-based conceptualisation of the material manifestations of common good in the context of the pandemic. These key manifestations include widening participation, promoting social cohesion and democracy, promulgating a global knowledge system, promoting a sense of community embeddedness, and designing and implementing common-good oriented financial models for higher education. The study demonstrates that, despite some potentially perilous financial implications, English universities' reactions to the pandemic indicate a move closer to the common good ideal. The paper explains this crisis of opportunity to argue that the pandemic offers potential for a shift towards the common good as a guiding principle for universities in order to support sustainable and equitable development.

This paper offers new qualitative insights into ongoing internationalization processes in Japanese higher education. Drawing on ideas from migration studies and informed by analysis of junior international faculty members' (JIFs) experiences in Japanese universities, we posit a novel, actor-centered typology of internationalization that delineates between integration, assimilation, and marginalization of mobile actors, and considers their implications in practice. Twenty-three interviews were conducted with JIFs from a variety of disciplines and institutions across Japan. Findings indicated a pattern of disillusionment with their role in internationalization, as many perceived themselves to be tokenized symbols of internationalization rather than valued actors within it. Participants identified various barriers which prevented them from participating in the academic "mainstream" and confined them to peripheral roles. We argue that their experiences are indicative of assimilative and marginalizing forms of internationalization, which pose persistent barriers to reform in Japanese universities despite decades of state-sponsored internationalization.

This paper examines shifts in the knowledge production policy agenda at Japanese research universities -- a transition from discipline-based academic tradition towards interdisciplinary forms of knowledge production -- through a case study of a leading interdisciplinary research institute. We examine this transition through the case of Tohoku University, one of seven 'Designated National Universities', and its flagship International Research Institute of Disaster Science. Documentary analysis revealed a renewed emphasis on interdisciplinarity, evident in restructuring towards a 'blended hybrid' model to reconcile the different institutional logics of diverse research traditions among its staff. Interviews with key stakeholders uncovered the internal dynamics of this process, its barriers and opportunities. We conclude with implications for Japanese higher education, arguing that a shift to 'blended hybrid' institutional forms is necessary but insufficient to maintain successful interdisciplinary research institutes. Success is contingent on simultaneous commitment to sustainable international connections and relationships with diverse external stakeholders.