Mothers who migrate to study abroad are an understudied population (Lockwood et al., 2019); consequentially, international students with mothering responsibilities in Western higher education institutions, including in Australia, are largely invisible in university and government policies and support structures. The purpose of this study is to understand the experiences of these minority students in Australian universities, who often leave their children in their home countries or who are accompanied by their families, including children, while they pursue higher education within a new culture. This qualitative, matricentric study adopted an intersectional feminist approach to analyse the data collected through 20 in-depth, semi-structured online interviews with international postgraduate student-mothers, mainly from the global South, during the context of the COVID-19 global pandemic. In addition to interview data, participants provided photographs of themselves that were used for photo-elicitation (Harper, 2002) to illuminate the narrative stories presented in the finding chapters. This study utilised a voice-centred relational method, the Listening Guide (Gilligan et al., 2003), to analyse the interview data. To analyse the complex intersectional experiences of international postgraduate student-mothers in this study, a number of theoretical lenses were used, including the work of Foucault (1979, 1980, 1994), post-structural feminism (Davies & Gannon, 2005; St. Pierre, 2000; Weedon, 1987), and matricentric feminism (O'Reilly, 2016), as well as the concept of the "good" mother (Goodwin & Huppatz, 2010). The participants exhibited a complex relationship with the social construction of motherhood, which enabled them to conform with and resist culturally specific motherhood discourses that influenced their international higher education trajectory from start to finish. Together with rich personal narratives, the findings chapters present researcher-generated Ipoems; these are part of the Listening Guide method (Gilligan et al., 2003) and facilitated the amplification of the self-voices of the participants in relation to broader structural, social, and cultural contexts. In addition, participants' narratives constructed Australian postgraduate education as a gendered experience for many mothers from the global South, as they negotiate multiple, intersecting socially marginalised identities, including mothers, women, "non-traditional" students, international students, and minorities, to gain academic success in the global North. The participants' narratives of structural in/equities revealed that, while they do receive academic support and minimal psychological support at their universities, they are severely disadvantaged as mothers by a nexus of inequitable and "careblind" policies (Moreau, 2016, p.16), both at the university and at the state and federal government levels. However, this matricentric study also establishes mothering as an empowering experience (O'Reilly, 2016) and reveals the agentic power of some participating mothers who employed various external (practical) and internal (emotional) situated strategies to cope with their intersectional challenges, gain academic success, balance personal relationships, and improve their well-being. The analytical concepts associated with post-structural and post-structural feminist theories - discourse, power, and agency (Davies & Gannon, 2005; Foucault, 1979, 1980, 1994; St. Pierre, 2000; Weedon, 1987) - offered additional lenses through which to understand how dominant discourses, such as the "good" mother (Goodwin & Huppatz, 2010), in different cultural contexts can influence the power, agency, and subjectivities of international postgraduate student-mothers from the global South. Through the knowledge of discourse, power, and agency, it was possible to determine how and why the participating mothers generated resistant discourses within their narratives, which served to present the findings related to both their challenging and empowering experiences in this study. This study is one of the first attempts to give voice to international postgraduate student-mothers in the context of the Australian neoliberal higher education marketplace (Davies & Bansel, 2007; K. Lynch, 2010). By providing a deeper insight into the experiences of international postgraduate student-mothers, the findings of this study have added a matricentric perspective to motherhood scholarship and the literature on the experiences of international students. These findings, alongside the associated recommendations offered in the conclusion, have the potential to inform higher education policymakers, practitioners, international student support organisations, and maternal scholar communities, including mothers from the global South who desire academic success in the global North. The study findings and recommendations emphasise affective or care-related equalities (K. Lynch, 2010) for international postgraduate student-mothers in higher education and broader communities in Australia.
| Date of Award | 2023 |
|---|
| Original language | English |
|---|