Article

Journal of International Students

Volume 13, Issue 1(2023), pp. 85-93
ISSN: 2162-3104 (Print), 2166-3750 (Online)
ojed.org/jis

Immobility in Mobility during COVID-19:

Reflections on ‘Being Stuck’ in the Home Country
of an International Doctoral Student
Anh Ngoc Quynh Phan
The University of Auckland, New Zealand

ABSTRACT

While international education has long been characterized by mobility, the

COVID-19 pandemic has shifted our attention to immobility when thousands of
international students have experienced immobility in various ways, one of which
is being stuck in their home countries. This paper records how the new situation
of immobility challenged an international doctoral student’s identity and presents
her efforts to find and give a new meaning to her educational mobility. Through
the sensemaking framework, this paper not only illuminates the consequences of
disrupted mobility on an international doctoral student’s academic learning but
also highlights the student’s sensemaking process, which then offers a research
area that may yield interesting insights in this unprecedented time of uncertainty.

Keywords: mobility, immobility, sensemaking, international doctoral student,

COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced unprecedented changes to the landscape

of international higher education, entailing unique structural and systematic
challenges to the current cohort of international students. Its catastrophic fatality
has put international students in multiple risks and threats. According to Firang
(2020), international students are a vulnerable population who would likely
experience social and psychological distress such as “emotional distress, impaired
sense of personal self-worth, loss of interpersonal contacts, and impaired task
(academic) performance” (p. 2). They might also be challenged by financial
hardships, increased food and housing insecurities, uncertain future employment
and migration possibilities, and discrimination (Zhai & Du, 2020; Bilecen, 2020;
Jenei et al., 2020; Hari et al., 2021). In China and other parts of Asia, international
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students experienced “social exclusion and xenophobic attitudes” and became

“victims of discrimination and verbal assaults”, which calls for an urgency of their
well-being protection (Bilecen, 2020, p. 263). Concerns over “a sudden loss of
mobility horizons” as well as “mental and physical strain” are also expressed in
Portugal (Cairns et al., 2021, p. 12). The novel coronavirus turned the sense of
unlimited and desirable mobility into restricted and undesirable mobility as
international borders were shut in many countries and international students were
then trapped, either in their host countries (Cao & Chieu, 2021; Le, 2021; Phan,
2022a), or in their home countries like myself. However, little research has been
conducted on the experiences of students who are stuck in their home nation and
cannot fly back to their receiving country. In Phan (2022b), I charted my own
emotional geographies, and sense of space and belonging as being a stranded PhD
student. In this article, I attempt to offer insight into the impacts of disrupted
mobility caused by the global crisis at the individual level of an international PhD
student, and more importantly, the way I made sense of my immobility situation.
Like many other international PhD students who are often described as
“mobile subjectivities, embedded in transnational social spaces and involved in
cross-border activities and practices” (Bilecen, 2013, p. 670) and possess “a sense
of unlimited global mobility” (Gomes, 2015, p. 10), I took mobility for granted. I
was supposed to travel freely between New Zealand, my host country, and
Vietnam, my home country, as long as my visa was valid. However, COVID-19,
“a disruptive transformation of the world and of ways of sensing and making sense
of it”, has marked “a break, shift or bifurcation in the way things are and the ways
they work” (Ingram, 2019, p.11).
When I started my second year of candidature in early 2020, the coronavirus
appeared in China, and countries around the world were alerted about the
unprecedented rate of infection and casualty of the virus. The New Zealand
government issued travel bans for passengers departing from China, including
Chinese international students, with the hope of shielding the country from the
new infectious disease. In March 2020, I returned to Vietnam for research
purposes and was supposed to stay in my home nation until October 2020. Just
two weeks after I left New Zealand, the country went into a national lockdown,
and international students were not allowed to enter. I have been away from my
campus and my host nation for almost two years. I am still waiting for the travel
restriction to be lifted so that I can return to my study country. The pandemic has
‘broken’ my mobility, which has been the core of my doctoral pursuit. I asked
myself many times whether I would have to finish my PhD programme from home
in Vietnam. Like hundreds of international students who are caught stranded in
their home countries due to the pandemic, I felt an urge to make sense of the new
situation and give it a new meaning to my academic and personal development.
Exploring my inward reflections on my immobility and disrupted international
doctoral study due to the COVID-19 crisis, this article details my experiences as
an active participant in international education amidst the pandemic that hindered
physical mobility, leaving me ‘stuck' at home and requiring me to reconfigure and
find a new meaning for my learning process.

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In response to Schewel’s (2020) argument against the ‘mobility bias’,

indicating the overfocus on cross-border movement and the tendency to see
immobility as a “default situation” or a passive state of being, this article
illuminates how being immobile does not necessarily mean being inactive or
passive. It highlights how the sensemaking framework is important for
international students to re-examine and reconfigure their learning to retain their
academic progress and retain their identity as an international doctoral student.
The paper will be of interest to institutions, supervisors and international students
themselves to provide timely assistance to students against the worldwide chaos
context. The article continues with the theoretical underpinning of the article, the
sensemaking framework, before moving on to the reflection of my own
experiences: being in a structural limbo, a weakened sense of belonging, and
attempts to be digitally mobile. It concludes with implications for international
student mobility and the global higher education landscape as COVID-19 has
started to become ‘the new normal’.

THE SENSEMAKING FRAMEWORK

To understand my immobility situation and the changing circumstances, I adopted

the sensemaking framework to analyze my own experiences, which were recorded
in my own research journals in various forms (poetry, short paragraphs, bullet
points, and photographs) and on multiple platforms (a physical notebook, a
research diary on Google doc, and the Notes application on my phone).
According to the sensemaking framework, individuals when faced with
unexpected, ambiguous or uncertain circumstances will be engaged in a
sensemaking process to not only understand the new situation but also plan further
action (Weick et al., 2005; Mills et al., 2010). As Degn (2018) explains,
sensemaking is an ongoing process through which individuals construct a
plausible story of ‘what is going on’ by picking out cues such as events, ideas,
and issues that are prominent and meaningful when placed in existing frames such
as mental modes or cultural scripts. By that virtue, sensemaking can be
summarized as a process that
unfolds as a sequence in which people concerned with identity in the
social context of other actors engage in ongoing circumstances from
which they extract cues and make plausible sense retrospectively while
enacting more or less order into those ongoing circumstances. (Weick et
al., 2005, p. 409)
In that sense, the sensemaking process helps one to seek meaning in the new
situation. According to Daft and Weick (1984), understanding and action depend
upon the meaning assigned to any set of events. Meaning, however, is a socially
constructed phenomenon that is subjective and constrained by the context of the
goals that human actors aim to realize (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Weick, 1979).
Through these sensemaking processes, I attempted to gain a better understanding
of the disrupted mobility and its meaning to me as an international PhD student
by investigating how it influenced my sense of belonging and my academic

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learning. From there on, I tried to give sense or attach meaning to the situation to
empower myself to overcome the immobility and recognize new forms of
mobility. In brief, the sensemaking process helped me to unfold how the
interrupted mobility due to COVID-19 influenced my doctoral study during the
pandemic. In what follows, I story my experiences into themes that highlighted
my sensemaking of my experiences of immobility and detachment and digital
mobility. The themes related to the chronological development of my experiences
of being stranded in Vietnam. Specifically, I selected experiences and events and
ordered along a line of time from my viewpoint as an international PhD student
and linked them to extant literature to integrate into my sensemaking processes.

MAKING SENSE OF IMMOBILITY

Disrupted Mobility And Identity Challenged: Finding A New Meaning

It is not exacerbating to say that the COVID-19 pandemic has become the
defining event of my sojourn because it has paralysed my mobility and instead
replaced it with immobility. While my doctoral venture should be characterized
by border-crossing activities, it has now been reinvented to be border-stopping
and border-stopped. There were cases when I strongly felt the ensuing
disadvantages of my disrupted international education. For instance, I had to pass
many chances of attending workshops and seminars hosted in my campus in New
Zealand or opportunities to be a research assistant for ongoing projects in my
institution. I wished I could have been able to be there for my study and academic
development. Learning from here in my home country turned my international
education into a lonely academic experience. My education mobility now is a
combination of here and there, and a separation between here and there. That is
a new meaning of my sojourn.
I was constantly asked by my family and friends in Vietnam and New
Zealand whether I would return to New Zealand to resume my study, when and
how, whether I had any online courses, or whether my study had to be suspended
due to my physical absence from campus. I also asked myself whether I would
have to complete my study in Vietnam and when I could fly back to New Zealand.
These questions shook my identity as a doctoral student and a sojourner to the
core (Phan, 2022b). While COVID-19 was not stopped at any border of any
country, “borders continue to be a real force” (Dunn, 2010, p. 5) in my mobility
for education. Borders even became the response to every question that I was
asked about my doctoral sojourn: “I am not sure, I will fly back when they allow
international students to enter”. While a PhD study is considered an independent
project and a doctoral student the engineer of his/her own candidature, in my
experience, it was no longer the case. I was dependent on the ongoing pandemic
and the news of border reopening. I realized it was no longer me who was the
protagonist of the PhD adventure but the COVID-19.
Doctoral student development is not only about “what is being developed,
but where and how development takes place” (Patton et al., 2016, p. 34). The
social spaces in immediate settings in which doctoral students experience in their

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everyday life, such as the campus, and the direct interaction with people,
activities, roles, and objectives (Engeström, 1987), which refer to supervisors,
other faculty members, fellow doctoral students, and other academic activities,
are believed to contribute to the emerging academic identity of doctoral students
(Jarvec-Martek, 2008). When being separated from my circles of friends and the
spaces in my campus, although I was still able to ‘meet’ them virtually through
various platforms, the complexity, frequency and intensity of our interactions
were greatly reduced. I was not able to attend my friends’ graduation ceremony
or be there for their important candidacy milestones. Neither could I drop by and
meet my supervisors in their offices whenever I had a question to discuss. The
pandemic and immobility has taken me outside my academic milieu. I felt as if
my academic and personal “footprints were wiped from my campus”, my doctoral
office, and the whole academic environment in my institution (Phan, 2022b, p.
71). I practically lived in a liminal space, an in-between position when I should
be in New Zealand but could not. I had to stay in Vietnam but was not entirely
committed to life here because my study and schedule followed the New Zealand
time zone. As such, I did not physically cross my national borders, but I was half
living and working outside the borders.

Making New Sense Of The Doctoral Journey

The interrupted mobility, as illustrated above, clearly affected my identity as

an international doctoral student and hence required me to reconceptualize and
reorganize my academic learning. I felt an urge to make sense of the new reality
and give it a new meaning so that my international doctoral study remained
meaningful to me. In other words, I had to learn to give new meaning to this
disruption and my PhD study within the limitations of geographic mobility.
Before COVID-19 occurred, I thought my doctoral study was to become an
academic. Now, it turned to becoming and being an independent academic.
Furthermore, while I used to embrace mobility as the nature of my sojourn, I
learned to appreciate and give new meanings to immobility during the global
chaos.
Since I was aware that my physical absence from the campus reduced
my interactions with my supervisors despite our regular online meetings and email
exchanges, I considered it a signal to become more independent. I would prioritize
only important matters to discuss with them during the supervision meetings and
try to be more autonomous. Being stuck in Vietnam also allowed me to reconnect
with my friends and former colleagues, and we took this chance to collaborate to
publish articles about the Vietnamese education context during the pandemic.
Although I did not stop feeling sorry for my interrupted sense of belonging in the
academic community in New Zealand and I kept longing for the return, I found
the new opportunities of reconnection with and the renewed sense of belonging
to the Vietnamese academic setting a soothing remedy and compensation for my
weakened sense of belonging to my New Zealand research community. With my
supervisors’ constant support that I was competent enough to take charge of my
own learning trajectory, I grew to become and be more independent. In that sense,

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although my sojourn took a U-turn, it did not steer me away from the path of
becoming an academic and instead allowed me to explore more opportunities to
achieve that goal. I learned to be(coming) an (emerging) academic.
Although the immobility and restricted travel prevented me from returning to
my host country and institution, it saved me from another type of precarity to
international students emerging out of the pandemic: being stuck in the study
destination and not being able to travel home (Phan, 2022a). The immobile
situation now had a new meaning to me, immobility in safety. I could live close to
my family, and we could be together while the novel virus continued to be a global
threat. On the one hand, I did not totally escape the liminal situation of being both
here and there but not completely here or there. On the other hand, I found this
in-between space a space of negotiation in which I could negotiate immobility
with other forms of mobility, such as digital mobility. As I could not travel the
world of physical borders, I had to resort to traversing the borderless world: the
Internet. I both created and found space to articulate my personal sense of
belonging to academia and desire to be an independent academic. As I felt
detached from my host institution and the immediate academic community, I
learned new ways of working and interacting with others. The migration of
educational events to online platforms such as lectures, workshops and webinars
was helpful in creating new places of togetherness and new opportunities for
learning. They allowed me to reach further to various corners of the world for
academic enrichment. Through this digital learning space, I started to cultivate a
new sense of place online and a renewed sense of belonging to the academic
community. I now considered this digital space a new space of unlimited mobility.
Digital mobility was not only a temporary replacement of physical mobility for
me. It now acquired a new meaning of mobility expansion, allowing me to be
adaptive and to gain a new skill.

CONCLUSION

The global health crisis, in international higher education and to international

students, has been a global mobility crisis. What we, as border-crossers for
educational purposes, are encouraged to do is not to expect to resume but rather
re-envisioning and reimagining our international mobility in “the long comet tail
of COVID-19” (Bissel, 2021, p. 157). In that sense, whether the world will return
to that which we used to know is hard to foresee. Rather than restricting ourselves
to thinking of the post-COVID world similar to the prepandemic world, we may
prepare ourselves for a scenario when international education will be susceptible
to the long-lasting impacts of the pandemic, including enforcing more border
controls, stricter visa processing, limited travel and fewer economical flights. My
immobility experience and the new sense I tried to make out of the new reality
have urged us to understand international students’ (im)mobility in a new and
more nuanced way. Specifically, we should acknowledge the complexities of
students’ experiences in (im)mobility and how such complexities can become
meaningful to students’ lives. It might weaken students’ sense of belonging and

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require them to reconfigure their identity. However, the new situation of restricted
and disrupted mobility can be a space where negotiation of meanings happens that
subsequently enables international students to give new sense to reality and be
empowered to tackle the challenges.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to express her gratitude toward Professor Toni Bruce and
Dr. Esther Fitzpatrick for their constant support of her academic development.
The author would also like to thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for
their feedback on the earlier draft of the manuscript.

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Author bios
ANH NGOC QUYNH PHAN has completed her PhD project at The University
of Auckland, New Zealand. Her major research interests focus inter alia on
transnationalism, migration, mobility, diaspora, identity, doctoral education,
teacher education, and researcher development. Anh is familiar with various
qualitative methodologies, such as narrative inquiry, critical autoethnography,
collaborative autoethnography, and poetic inquiry.
Email: [email protected]

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