Race, Racism, and Racialization in International Higher Education: A Transnational and Mobility-Aware Approach

Race, racism, and racialization are increasingly recognized as central to understanding inequality in global higher education. Yet dominant frameworks in comparative and international higher education remain nationally bounded and citizenship-centered, offering limited insight into how race operates under conditions of mobility, legal temporariness, and transnational governance. As internationalization intensifies through student mobility, cross-border partnerships, and global knowledge circulation, racialized experiences are shaped by visa-dependent status, differential protection, global racial imaginaries and discourses, uneven or unequal geopolitical relations and institutional logics of internationalization (including marketization, risk management and revenue extraction). In this conceptual article we argue that race and racialization in international higher education cannot be adequately understood without examining internationalization itself—particularly as theorized within critical internationalization studies—as a structuring regime of racial power. Centering temporarily mobile populations such as international students, migrant workers, and refugees, the article synthesizes foundational race scholarship and  identifies key limitations in prevailing approaches. We advance  the Transnational and Mobility‑Aware Framework of Racialization that accounts for the co-constitutive roles of nationality, geopolitics, and home-country racial regimes. As the opening article of this Special Issue, it provides a conceptual foundation for examining how race, racism, and racialization operate through internationalization practices and for imagining more racially and socially just models of global higher education. The article concludes with implications for practitioners and institutional leaders, policy, and future research.