The Lived Experiences of African International Students in the UK: Precarity, Consciousness and the Law

by James Marson, Katy Ferris, Mohammed Dirisu

Overview

International student migration makes a significant contribution to higher education in the United Kingdom, with Southern Africa, and Nigeria in particular, positioned joint sixth in the top ten of sending countries. Many of these student-migrants, in supplementing their finances to fund their studies in the United Kingdom, undertake employment. Temporary and/or part-time employment is integral to the student-migrant experience, despite the express purpose of their admission into the United Kingdom designated for study purposes and not work. This explicit object is reflected in restrictions affixed to international students’ employment rights whilst studying; they are generally restricted to a maximum of 20 hours of work per week during term time and proscribed from working full time or as independent contractors. Given the scant regard this topic has received in the existing literature, this study offers an examination of students’ lived employment experiences under these rules. The study aims to offer a contribution, first in respect of the employment experiences of student-migrants through the analytical framework of ‘precarity’ by examining the various manifestations of insecurity in the students’ lived realities, nuanced by structures of migration control and labour market temporalities. Secondly, by adopting the socio-legal schema of legal consciousness, the study considers the student-migrants’ relationship with the law by way of the legal restrictions on their employment and examines their agency as evidenced through efforts to derogate from these rules.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781839982118
Publisher:	Anthem Press
Publication date:	01/11/2022
Pages:	254
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

James Marson is a Reader in Law and Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He holds a PhD from the University of Sheffield.

Mohammed Dirisu is a Lecturer and Researcher at Sheffield Hallam University, and holds a PhD from the same institution. He has special interests in socio-legal research, human rights, social justice, migration, business ethics, corporate governance and social responsibility.

Katy Ferris is Associate Professor in Business Law at Nottingham University Business School. She is author of textbooks and articles in law with a special interest in welfare, legal education and social justice.

Table of Contents

Preface; Acknowledgements; Legislation; Case Law; 1. Introduction; 2. Methodology; 3. Student Migration and Global Inequality; 4. Migration as a Socio- Legal Phenomenon; 5. The ‘Student- Migrant-Worker’ Meets ‘Precarity’; 6. The ‘Utterly Transactional Worker’; 7. Semi-Legal Working?; 8. Conclusions; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

The Lived Experiences of African International Students in the UK provides insightful and topical analysis of international students’ experiences of insecure work. It contributes to the debates in law and socio-legal studies, focusing on the inconsistencies between the desire to attract highly-skilled migrants and the neoliberal policies that create low-pay and low-skilled employment in a deregulated labour market.” —Dr Sanna Elfving, University of Bradford, UK

“The two principal frames of analysis employed in The Lived Experiences of African International Students in the UK are expertly chosen and well expedited. The word is well organised. It is well set up where the earlier parts identify the gaps and how to plug those gaps, whilst the methodology is carefully chosen, dissected and critiqued, before the authors continue to the main empirical work. Methods and methodology are convincing and well justified. Structurally, it makes sense for the findings to then flow from here in later chapters. Thematic analysis is appropriate given the nature of the (qualitative) data. An inductive, data-driven, approach to the findings is then offered whereby original data is presented to help make claims, inferences are credible and the narrative is told convincingly.”—Dr Anna Kawalek, Leeds Beckett University, UK

From the Publisher