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The report looks at the the impact of precarity on international students. It focuses on highly and extremely precarious students.
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Citations
... This situation is exemplified by Australia (Morris, Hulse, & Pawson, 2021). Notably, many international students face multi-dimensional precarity (Morris, Ashton, & Wilson, 2022), in which legally insecure housing is an important aspect. ...
The housing experience of international students has attracted increasing academic attention in recent years. Australia’s large international student population is largely reliant on lightly-regulated private rental housing, a market sector subject to extreme turbulence during COVID-19. However, while aspects of Australian student housing stress during the pandemic have been already investigated, the specific issues affecting a substantial component of the broader cohort have yet to be examined. Around 130,000 Australian international students were stranded overseas for two years (2020-22) by international border closures. Their experiences of this episode cast new light on vulnerable renter precarity in lightly-regulated markets. Via an online survey and in-depth interviews, this paper examines the challenges posed for stranded Chinese international students in terms of their Australian tenancies, and how these were handled. Three main findings emerge: 1) uncertainty deriving from travel restrictions reduced student bargaining power in the rental market; 2) inability to terminate leases, unfavourable rent negotiation outcomes and welfare exclusion caused serious financial stress; and 3) widespread subletting exposed students to eviction and exploitation. These findings foreground important downsides of Australia’s long-existing neoliberal university regime and inadequate student housing provision that endanger the fundamental purposes of higher education, and risk tarnishing Australia’s reputation as an international student destination.
... As a result, research in this area, especially that focused on major destinations in the Global North, has only rarely acknowledged the full diversity of socio-economic backgrounds within this group. However, there is increasing recognition of a critical need to acknowledge the vulnerability and precarity faced by many international students, progressing beyond the aforementioned 'flattening' of the socio-economic dimensions of international student mobility (Gilmartin et al., 2021;Lipura & Collins, 2020;Raghuram et al., 2020;Morris et al., 2022a). ...
... First, we highlight the high level of variation within this group, drawing on the results of a survey of over 7000 international students in the private rental sector in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia's two largest cities. The survey collected information on the number of financial stress indicators students experienced in the last year and premised on the number experienced students are divided into four precarity groupssecure, moderately precarious, highly precarious, and extremely precarious (Morris et al., 2022a). Second, the division of students according to levels of financial deprivation enables an exploration of the ways in which economic insecurity, and other facets of broader lived experience-wellbeing, free time, and relationships-interact with each other and shape migrants' experiences differentially along lines of financial vulnerability. ...
Empirical research on international student migrants has sometimes homogenised this group, framing it as predominantly made up of privileged members of the global middle-class. This has led to calls to acknowledge and address the precarity faced by international students in their respective host countries more comprehensively. This study aims to explore how levels of financial precarity vary among international students in Australia, and how this in turn contributes to varying levels of precariousness in the personal spheres of students’ lives. In doing so, we centre and refine the concept of precarity for use in studies of internationally mobile students, arguing for its use as a ‘relational nexus’, bridging financial precarity and broader lived experiences. Drawing on a large-scale survey and semi-structured interviews with 48 students, we emphasise the linkages between financial precarity and precariousness as a socio-ontological experience, explored through the examples of time poverty, physical and mental wellbeing, and relationships.
