Book Talk – Indebted Mobilities: Indian Youth, Migration and the Internationalizing University

The South Asia Center at the Moynihan Institute presents a book talk with Susan Thomas, assistant professor of cultural foundations of education at SU’s School of Education. Thomas is also a senior research associate in the South Asia Center. 

International students, undoubtedly, have become crucial to the revenue generation schemes of educational institutions, their growing presence contributing to a multi-billion dollar industry. Yet very little attention is paid to the stories of longings and struggle that underlie their migratory paths. Susan Thomas takes such stories as her point of departure, arguing that they are formative to the educational circuits of neoliberal globalization.

Her new book, “Indebted Mobilities” (University of Chicago Press), is an ethnographic rendering of a group of middle-class Indian migrant men who attended a public university in New York just as the institution sought to “internationalize” its campus in the wake of ongoing withdrawals of state funding.

Marked by considerations of labor, post-9/11 surveillance, and other modes of exclusion, at the heart of their encounters is these young people’s relationship to debt, which becomes critical to how they make sense of their experiences as student-migrants. These youth may long to be modern “men of the world,” but “Indebted Mobilities” illuminates how the complex realities that arise force them to reckon with their anxieties about successful masculinities and confront the precarity of being drawn into the global knowledge economy as indebted migrants.