International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS)

This dissertation examines what it means to be both international student and migrant at the same time. In the past decade Asian, and in particular Indian, students have found their way to Australia to continue their higher education there. Australia is extremely competitive in luring international students to its universities and considers the business of selling/offering higher education an industry by itself. Australia's Education Industry even ranks in third place in terms of export. Yet this industry is not all about students. As I show in detail, for many Indian students coming to Australia it's the first step towards Australian permanent residency. I analyze the reasons for this in light of changing Indian middle class perceptions on their place in India as well as in a global playground. The dissertation critiques current understandings of migration and transnationalism in terms of its lack to properly deal with personal lifestyles and the way people imagine and are able to imagine a life beyond their own country's borders. Commercial entrepreneurs in both India and Australia have started to understand this as well, because of which the whole business of offering international education to Asian/Indian students haas not only become about education but also about migration, and even more remarkably: about offering an opening into a global lifestyle which is often modeled on that of Indians who have already managed to more or less permanently leave India and live the kind of transnational lives that earlier studies dealt with. This dissertation, thus, looks at how transnational lives are imagined, started, triggered and also become commercial commodities to be offered and sold in a globalized market place.