In 2016, the UK voted to leave the European Union (EU). This outcome was not only unexpected but also had clear geographical and age-bound divisions. While people over the age of 65 tended to vote to leave, younger voters were more likely to vote to remain a part of the EU. Reflecting on 7 years of journalism, this paper explores the ways in which young people have been represented by the news media with regards to the issue of Brexit. It analyses a database of 700 news media articles published from 2016 to 2022 across the UK, equating to 100 articles per calendar year and ranging from regional sources to those with an international reach. The paper showcases how young people occupy liminal spaces within the news media through an analysis of the language used to describe their political participation, and a focus on their role within political activism. As it is this media that dominates hegemonic narratives within traditional political spheres, the retelling and representation of young people's engagement serves, we argue, to reinforce their liminality as citizens apart.

This paper examines the interplay between geopolitical goals, governance and International Student Mobility (henceforth ISM). It explores how the United Kingdom's newly envisaged domestic credit-mobility programme (the Turing Scheme) is reshaping the spatiality of their outward student mobility flows to bolster a global sense of internationalisation through ISM. During its emergence, the Turing Scheme was often positioned as an antithesis to the pre-established Erasmus+ Scheme which had a strong focus on European integration, instead it focused on promoting a 'Global Britain' narrative. This paper conducts a content analysis of Hansard (transcripts of debates in the U.K.'s Houses of Parliament), to reflect on ISM decision-making, debating the choices made and unmade regarding the development of the Turing Scheme. This research illuminated multiple issues, adding to the debate about the importance of ISM for geopolitical purposes, and how these can underpin credit-mobility schemes, and shape these during periods of large-scale geopolitical change.

In this article, we provide an introduction to the special issue on ‘Challenges to International Student Mobility within Europe’. We first discuss the current context of such mobility and justify our focus on Europe, in particular, by outlining some distinctive features of this geographical region. We then outline the contributions of the articles that make up the special issue—in terms of the challenges they identify, the ways in which they theorise international student mobility, and the responses they proffer. Throughout, we acknowledge the rich extant literature on international student mobility and weave this into our discussion as appropriate.

This paper provides a critical overview of scholarship on the geographies of education. The article explores some of the key roots, linguistic traditions, and conceptual underpinnings of what has become a burgeoning and diverse area of scholarship. It emphasises the different subdisciplinary areas to which research on geographies of education has contributed, including work on social reproduction, the relationship between education spaces and their “outsides,” the agency of learners, structural inequalities, learners’ experiences, materialities, and mobilities. The paper concludes with some suggestions about future work on geographies of education, identifying key areas of potential in terms of connection: with scholarship on geography education; with research going on outside geography; with scholarship on education spaces less well‐represented thus far (such as Further Education); and with research on and from non‐Anglophone contexts and the Majority Global South.

Covid-19COVID-19 has, however, threatened to derail this. While the demand for international educationinternational education has persisted event during the global pandemic, it has, at the very least, altered fundamentally the international studentinternational students experienceexperience (Bilecen in International Migration 58:263–266, 2020). This commentary will use lettersletters written to the pandemic through the lens of the borderborder to unpick some of the ways in which this has been the case.

International students are a critical source of income for UK universities, and yet reports indicate that their numbers have been in decline since academic year 2010–2011. Consequently, UK universities need to work harder to attract international students than ever before. This paper uses qualitative interviews with international office staff based at UK higher education institutions together with observational research at recruitment events which took place in Hong Kong in 2017 to demonstrate how the urban has a critical role to play in the international student migration industry. The paper showcases three urban encounters in the recruitment process: the higher education recruitment fair; the connections universities draw between themselves and other urban locations; and by considering how predeparture events mobilise the urban landscape to communicate dynamic learning experiences. The retelling and analysis of these encounters demonstrate how universities, and the UK, create, foster and embed the geographical imaginary in their recruitment processes in order to entice and encourage brand loyalty from prospective students.

This paper analyses how performances of care are a critical feature within the international student recruitment process through an investigation of three distinctive geographical encounters: caring for students; supporting third-party recruiters; and acting collegially. Caring and the recognition of students as emotional beings is often cited as overlooked within internationalisation agendas brought about by the neoliberalised higher education system. This paper shows how performances of caring are mobilised as part of this as an attempt to secure international student enrolments. International students are a critical income stream in the university sector and, within the UK, higher education is a major export industry. However, growing competition from new markets, limited longer-term migration prospects, and evidence that international students are primarily viewed as cash cows, means that it is ever more difficult to recruit these students. This paper uses qualitative interviews with international office staff based at 10 UK higher education institutions together with observational research at recruitment events in Hong Kong in 2017 to offer critical and as yet unresearched insights into this aspect of the student recruitment process. It questions the validity of these caring practices and whether the university can ever be a "caring" entity if wider policy agendas are focused on the marketised and the neoliberal.

This commentary celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Population Geography Research Group (PGRG) of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG) by drawing on journal papers within Area, The Geographical Journal and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers presented in the virtual issue by the same name (https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley. com/doi/toc/10.1111/(ISSN)9999-0017.50yrs-pop-geography). It presents an introduction to the core research threads within Population Geography over the past half-century. The celebratory issue and the editorial guide readers through diverse and prolific contributions to Population Geography scholarship within the RGS-IBG journals across three core themes: the spatio-demographic characteristics of populations, the mobility that connects these, and emergent characteristics of places. This introduction is only a flavour of a vast and growing body of Population Geography research. Notwithstanding, it indicates how the sub-discipline has and will continue to shape debates on the study of population change to consider its complex nature, drivers, and consequences. Despite differences in methods and approaches, the sub-discipline unites to explore populations in space in an applied manner. This issue also highlights fundamental challenges going forward. Calls to decolonise the academy have resulted in questions of the structures through which we work - for Population Geography this means thinking about the diversity of voices, theories, and approaches. The papers in this virtual issue thus provide a grounding backdrop of knowledge as we look forward to many more years of lively debate.

International students are a fundamental part of the global higher education system providing a critical income stream for many universities but also diversifying and enriching culturally our campuses and the learning experiences of host students. Further, beyond selling the 'prestige' of the degree from the host institution, many universities often claim that international study is culturally enriching for the international students also. Or so the argument goes. This UK case study reveals that the reality for international students can be very different by examining the difficulties they face in forming robust cross- and multi-cultural friendships when overseas. In so doing it makes important contributions to the burgeoning networks, and more established transnationalism and mobility studies literatures by reflecting on how we negotiate the unfamiliar and geographically distinctive places through the social networks that we establish there. Principally it aims to overturn previous assertions that distinctive international student networks are the result of liminality and exclusion by showing that they are also a conscious choice made by the students themselves, functioning as an important source of social, cultural and political support when living overseas.

Greater interconnectivity has led to a growth in the number of students enrolling at universities outside of their home country. This chapter offers a review of the changing policies that have led to greater competition between both countries and universities for international students and the development of education as a key export industry in many industrialized societies. It analyzes the complex and multifaceted issues that play a part in student decision making. In particular, it assesses how greater consumerism and the marketization of higher education has led to an interest in these decision-making processes and led to a dramatic expansion in the literature detailing student mobility. This chapter systematically analyzes this information, detailing how students choose an international education on the basis of economically focused factors (such as the improved job prospects that potentially come with international mobility) and how these go hand-in-hand with the sociocultural aspects of overseas study (such as the improved intercultural communication skills), to offer an overview of the complexity of overseas students' decision-making practices. To conclude, it suggests some key areas for consideration in emerging research and how this is advancing our current understandings of student mobility further -such as work by Carlson (Popul Space Place, 19 (2), 168-180, 2013), who suggested that a greater understanding of mobility as "processional," rather than at a single point in time, was critical as we move forward.

Of late there has been considerable interest in understanding international student mobility, and this has tended to focus on the perspective of the students who take part in this mobility. However, international students are part of a considerable migration industry comprised of international student recruitment teams, international education agents and other institutions selling an education overseas (such as the British Council in a UK context) and as yet there is little research which analyses these relationships. This paper investigates a series of interviews with international office staff to examine the methods they use to recruit international students, and in particular the relationship that they have with international education agents who work with them on a commission basis. It focuses on recent changes to the UK visa system which have led to a decline in the numbers of Indian students choosing to study towards a UK higher education. However, it also reveals that some universities have managed to avoid this trend. This paper investigates why this is the case, demonstrating that there is a need to think about the intersections between migration industries, visa regulations and international student mobility.