ANU PhD Pre-Fieldwork Seminar by Elena Williams: Transforming the self, transforming the relationship? Understanding the impact of study abroad programs on Australia-Indonesia people-to-people relationship building

Please join us for Elena Williams’s Pre-Fieldwork Seminar on 13 August 2021

Title: Transforming the self, transforming the relationship? Understanding the impact of study abroad programs on Australia-Indonesia people-to-people relationship building

Speaker: Elena Williams

Date and Time: 13 August 2021 (Friday), 3-5 p.m.

Via Zoom: https://anu.zoom.us/j/4604539898?pwd=UzhNTDkxNWlBd0lESGQxSmJhYW9xUT09

Meeting ID: 460 453 9898 Password: 509665

Abstract:  Study abroad programs between Australia and Indonesia have grown significantly in recent decades through a framework of ‘international education as public diplomacy’. Higher education institutions globally have embedded learning abroad programs as a key strategy in their efforts to ‘internationalise’ degree programs and provide graduates with ‘employability’, ‘intercultural’ and ‘global citizenship’ prospects in an increasingly globalised labour force. In Australia, there has been a significant increase in the number of students travelling to the ‘Indo-Pacific’ region, largely the result of funding made available through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s (DFAT’s) ‘New Colombo Plan (NCP)’ scholarship scheme since 2014. Yet, despite this increase in Australian outbound mobility to the region, and Indonesia’s prominence as a destination, gaps remain in scholarly accounts of study abroad’s impact in the lives of Australian students and Indonesian host communities. In particular, an assumption emerges across the literature that a student ‘self’ will be transformed by a study abroad experience, then convert this personal transformation by making positive contributions to the bilateral relationship.

Through a case study of the longest-running facilitator of study abroad programs to Indonesia, the Australian Consortium for ‘In-Country’ Indonesian Studies (ACICIS), my research interrogates this problem by speaking directly with students and host communities about their experiences of NCP-funded study abroad programs to Indonesia. By centring the experiences of students and host communities to redefine and reconceptualise what ‘impact’ means to them in their own lives, this research will generate evidence-based data grounded in participants’ lived experience of study abroad. This is significant as student and host community voices have often been minimised or excluded in the literature, despite their potential to enrich scholarly understanding of participants’ lived experiences of Australia-Indonesia study abroad programs, and their capacity for bilateral relationship building. This project will contribute to academic literature in International Education, Anthropology and Indonesian Studies by elucidating student and host community pathways of impact to transformation, interrogating whether personal transformations lead to collective, bilateral transformations. This research also aims to contribute not only to scholarly literature, but also to government and university policy setting for future Australia-Indonesia study abroad programs.  

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