Real Pandemic: Institutional Neglect

Breakout Room D

The neoliberal market-reform within the Canadian tertiary education sector led to the proliferation in student mobility, which has translated to 600,000 international students (IS) over the past two decades (Scott et al., 2015; Firang, 2020), contributing to Canada’s gross domestic product (GDP) by $26.1 billion (IRCC, 2019). Racialized IS attending post-secondary education (PSE) in Canada accounted for systemic barriers that thereby hinder their student experience and academic outcomes. Such challenges included culture shock (Popadiuk & Arthur, 2004), linguistic speaking barriers (Guo & Guo, 2017), discrimination (Myles & Cheng, 2003; Chen & Zhou, 2019), employment exploitation (Scott et al., 2015), securing housing, and utility resources (Calder et al., 2016). Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic quarantine and national security measures, racialized IS were vulnerable constituents within higher education (HE), however, little is known about their experiences during this dire circumstance, nor the implications of their identities as racialized and/or foreign others. Studies suggest that IS confront exacerbated academic, financial, health, mental, linguistic, and interpersonal challenges, mobility concerns, xenophobia, and discrimination (Bilecen, 2020; Chirikov & Soria, 2020; Li et al., 2020; Van de Velde et al., 2021). Other research reported that IS are more satisfied than domestic students, regarding the support they received from universities (Chirikov & Soria, 2020), their ability to adapt to remote learning (Chirikov & Soria, 2020; Nurfaidah et al., 2020), and felt a greater sense of agency within the community (Li et al., 2020; Nurfaidah et al., 2020). This research intends to examine how the COVID-19 pandemic has conditioned or changed racialized IS’ experiences in Southern Ontario, while simultaneously investigating the ways in which policies and support programs can mitigate the ramification during their remote instruction (Bolumole, 2020; Oanh et al., 2020). The research aims to illuminate and project racialized IS' voices/concerns towards Ontario higher educational institutions (HEIs) while they adapt to an uncertain and bleak new reality during the quarantine.