“Going Global” at Home: International Branch Campuses, Im/Mobilities, and the Tensions of Class and Language

In 2014, South Korea launched Incheon Global Campus (IGC), a shared campus where multiple international branch campuses operate together as a consortium of colleges. English is the medium of instruction at IGC, and each member university has autonomous control over the curriculum, staffing, faculty, and admissions of their individual branch campus. The aim of IGC is to provide Korean students with an affordable alternative to traditional study abroad sojourns by allowing students to essentially study abroad in situ. This goal is particularly notable given how South Korea has long served as a primary source country for international students studying abroad in other countries. The South Korean students who attend IGC are uniquely involved in a grand social experiment which complicates our understanding of international education. What does it mean when higher education institutions cross borders, circumventing the need for students to do so? Unfortunately, there has been a lack of attention to this phenomenon, not only in terms of empirical studies, but also in terms of critical theorizing regarding this novel type of international/transnational education and its impact on the student experience. IGC students are clearly different from the rest of the native student population since they are not attending a South Korean university, yet they are not quite “international” either since they do not travel overseas and instead remain immersed in their home environments. In short, they occupy a third space that is simultaneously international and domestic since they are essentially “going global at home”. This study explores the nature of student experiences in this liminal space, and the extent to which this transnational context symbolizes education’s potential to be a either a tool for social reproduction or social mobility. In these unique transnational spaces, students mobilize capital, especially linguistic capital, in ways that highlight a global dimension to Bourdi