International students: passive experiencers or active agents?

Recent global sociopolitical developments have changed the landscape for many international students. For example, in some countries that have traditionally been top destinations for students seeking to study abroad, such as the US and the UK, more restrictive immigration policies in response to these global trends have led to increased scrutiny of international students as well as other challenges. Universities have historically been places that present opportunities for students to become more engaged in political activism. However, research on international students in university settings has historically considered students as passive experiencers, with more focus on the challenges they face and less focus on the degree to which they may act as active agents in shaping their educational experience. A study in Studies in Higher Education maps the emerging literature on the agency of international students in a systematic review of fifteen studies. Two primary expressions of agency were revealed: political/social activism and resistance to institutional norms and practices. Activism was broader in scope, including historical and contemporary political practices, while resistance was more limited to everyday challenges to historic academic norms via subtle forms of actions. Perhaps the most important finding from the study is a discussion of the need to broaden the scope of research on international students to include, where relevant, studies of their agency in academic contexts.

Research focused on international students has grown greatly in recent decades, but the authors claim that this research often embraces deficit narratives that emphasize the struggles involved in adapting to new academic and sociocultural contexts. Recent global sociopolitical trends have increasingly shaped the experiences students have in some contexts, and even the motivation for studying abroad. For example, in some countries rising nationalism and increasingly restrictive immigration policy have led to more restrictive admissions policies and increased scrutiny of international students, and in some cases more limited post-graduation opportunities in the host country for longer-term international students. International conflicts have also shifted motivation for many international students, where living and studying abroad may be the only option for maintaining continuity in their studies. Given these trends, and the fact that universities have traditionally been arenas that encourage open debate and political activism, an emerging research question is the degree to which international students take a more active role in shaping their educational experiences. The authors note an increase in recent years of studies that focus on agency, which is the motivation for the current study.

The authors conducted a systematic review that investigated how the involvement of international students in activism and resistance initiatives has been addressed in the literature. The review followed PRISMA guidelines in searching multiple databases, with a final sample of 15 publications from 2005-2025. Nearly half of these were published since 2022, highlighting the increasing focus on agency. Studies were mapped on four dimensions — thematic, geographic, methodological, and theoretical. Not surprisingly, the majority of studies were from the field of education. Most studies in the corpus were qualitative studies, with an overrepresentation of the US and Australia as host countries and Asia as the most common region of origin for international students.

A thematic analysis of the corpus revealed two major themes related to agency. Not surprisingly given the small sample of studies, results for both themes were diverse and spanned a continuum of agency. This pattern highlights an emerging direction of research and identifies many directions for future research.

The first theme, political activism, revealed a wide range of student engagement centered on students as political actors beyond the university setting. This included overt participation in collective movements to more subtle and individualized forms of engagement. Historically this is reflected in movements led by African students in Israel in the 1960s and Angolan students in Cold War East Germany, as well as contemporary studies of activism for more equal rights. More recent studies document how temporary migration status can dampen activism, as students with short-term visas might be more reluctant to engage politically.

The second theme was resistance, and in particular resistance to institutional norms and what is interpreted as institutional power. In contrast to activism, this theme turns inward to look at how international students resist within the university. Again results showed a range of action, from more subtle resistance like silence and body language in classrooms to more active pushback against dominant Western assumptions.

Because this is a novel and understudied area of research, the study points to several future directions for research on international student agency. These include studies that focus on how students interact with current political movements in their host countries, such as climate change; the authors noted their surprise that the review did not find any studies examining these issues. In addition, the authors note the need for studies that go beyond individual acts of activism and resistance and examine how these acts interact with collective movements. Finally, they emphasize that future research should also considering how universities respond to international student agency, both at the institutional level and the personal level by examining responses by university faculty and staff.

Comment: Given the sparse and diverse empirical findings, the most important contribution of this paper is the broader point it makes about thinking about international students as potentially active agents in their educational experience (potentially because this clearly needs to be initiated by students if they choose). Should the trend identified in this study continue, it is exciting to think about what the results might look like if a similar review is conducted five or ten years from now.

This study has opened my eyes in important ways. Because some of the courses I teach touch on the intersection between psychology and politics, I have had the opportunity to engage with students on topics including political activism. I have been impressed by the passion and motivation of many students who engage in political activism or resistance in different ways and have heard many encouraging examples. These range from demonstrating on campus to engaging in, or even starting, student advocacy organizations as well as community organizations supporting at-risk or vulnerable people in society. Students who are actively engaged in their university and/or their community give one occasional doses of needed optimism.

In reflecting on this while reading this study, I realized that these examples were all Swedish students. Of course this is not surprising given that most international students are only here for a limited time, and international students are a minority of the students in my courses. As the authors note, temporary status can understandably limit student activism for several reasons, mainly because students see themselves as visitors without standing or power in the host country society. This study suggests that there may be more interest in political agency among international students that perhaps I realized.

However, this study has made me aware that there may be other barriers to agency that we should be mindful of. For example, I remember a conversation with an international student who expressed interest in joining a political demonstration on campus but turned back when he saw the police presence at the event. While the police presence was intended to increase safety for all involved, for a variety of reasons this student instead felt intimidated. I myself have seen times where the number of police at a demonstration at this university outnumbered the number of demonstrators, so I can understand how a student coming from a different sociopolitical context can interpret situations like this differently.

The study suggests that we might support our international students better if we improve our understanding and awareness of their perspectives in the broader sociopolitical context. This will clearly vary considerably depending on the course. When relevant to a given course, this could include encouraging dialogue in the classroom where international perspectives are explicitly valued. This could also include instructors becoming more aware of extracurricular activities, such as student clubs and other organizations, that are available for international students who show an interest in expressing their agency during their time studying abroad. Finally, it also may be important for instructors to increase their awareness of institutional practices and policies that may limit the potential for international student agency.

Text: Eric Pakulak, Department of Psychology

The Article
Sin, C., & Cardoso, S. (2025). International student agency in higher education: a systematic review of resistance and activism. Studies in Higher Education, 1-15.

Keywords: International students, agency, political activism, resistance