Critical Internationalization: Moving from Theory to Practice

Frances Vavrus would like to thank Emily Morris and Jasmine Trang Ha for providing valuable contributions to this article.

This article utilizes critical social theory to illuminate structures of inequality that undergird certain practices of internationalization in higher education institutions, particularly in U.S. institutions. We demonstrate how such theory can be productively employed to analyze three key dimensions of contemporary internationalization: 1) a representational dimension, 2) a political-economic dimension, and 3) a symbolic capital dimension. We argue that these three elements are central to any critical conceptualization of internationalization that has at its core a consideration of equity, ethics, and social justice. The overarching goal of this article is to illustrate how critical social theory can foster more extensive debate regarding the material and ideological systems of exclusion in international education and contribute to the task of reimagining internationalization.