Phattra Marbang is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Sociology, UGA. Her dissertation explores the paradoxical practices of international education and national security carried out by international student advisors, who work with the federal surveillance system in public and private universities. While immigration policies and student visa regulations are made at the federal level, it is these street-level bureaucrats that implement them on the ground. They negotiate, transform, and force-fit students’ and institutions’ needs within regulatory limitations. Based on thirty in-depth interviews and digital and event ethnography, she conceptualizes compliance with care, illustrating how international student advisors exercise discretion and manage the competing logics—international education and national security—to uphold multicultural values for higher education, maintain their institutions’ global-ranking statuses for studying abroad, and ensure security for campuses and the country. 

Her research also does the important work of documenting the current context of anti-immigration and mass deportation policies that not only strictly vet international students’ social media and research topics for anti-Americanism but also employ the method of crimmigration, such as speeding tickets, to revoke students’ status and limit access to U.S. knowledge. Importantly, she presents that the attack on international education and international students’ identities can also be thought of as a tool for the federal government to achieve larger political goals domestically and internationally, for instance, the attack on higher education, DEI programs, and trade wars.

Based on her dissertation research, she anticipates articles about the politics of international higher education and street-level bureaucrats. She suggests that the international education field is inherently political and a neocolonial project. It has never been solely about education or the rights to purchase education for outsiders; rather, it is about identity politics and the boundaries of the nation and citizenship. Who is allowed to access knowledge and participate in American social and academic life? 

Her plans for future research are twofold. First, she aims to analyze international students’ status and visa revocation cases to understand conditioned conclusions—bona fide students, crimmigration, and rights of noncitizens in academic space. Second, she is interested in further examining street-level bureaucrats in other social services and especially focusing on those who work with and for immigrant populations. Delivering public policies to citizens and noncitizens differs because legal status, deservingness, public charge consideration, and state policy condition the work.