2025 JFIPP Research Fellow - Levi Durbidge

Project Summary

As the Indo-Pacific recalibrates in the wake of pandemic-driven disruption and on going geopolitical instability, international education remains a vital mechanism for developing regional collaboration, diversification, and future leadership. This project examines how government-funded mobility programs, including Japan’s Tobitate!, Australia’s New Colombo Plan, and Vietnam’s Project 89, mediate interpersonal relationships, develop regional capabilities, and shape transnational literacies through student movement. Anchored by a nine-month residency in Japan and three months in Vietnam, the project focuses on trilateral flows between Japan, Australia, and Vietnam, countries positioned differently within the regional education economy yet increasingly interlinked.

The study combines multi-sited ethnography with comparative policy analysis to examine how students from diverse socioeconomic and linguistic backgrounds experience mobility and navigate its opportunities and constraints. Particular attention is paid to how language, often treated as something acquired passively, actually functions to shape access to learning opportunities and connections formed by students studying abroad with implications for the regional integration.

Through interviews, fieldwork, and analysis of funding schemes, institutional priorities, and post-return experiences, the project will investigate how international mobility policy is enacted, negotiated, and valued differently across contexts. By moving beyond dominant narratives of non-English speakers travelling to Anglophone destinations for education and drawing attention to trilateral movements in the Indo-Pacific, this project addresses key gaps in the field and supports evidence-based policymaking. It will culminate in scholarly outputs, policy recommendations, and media releases, contributing to more inclusive, multilingual, and equitable frameworks for regional cooperation. In doing so, it directly supports the Japan Foundation’s mission to foster peace and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific through intellectual exchange and people-to-people connection, positioning international mobility not as a soft power tool alone, but as a shared regional infrastructure for sustainable futures.