Desired learning, disavowed learning: Scale-making practices and subverting the hierarchy of study abroad experiences

This article illustrates dynamic relations between the hierarchy of learning experience in study abroad and scale-making practices that assert a particular unit of comparison. The discourse of immersion prevalent in study abroad valorizes immersion in the host country's life and downgrades spending time with compatriot students or in the classroom, creating a hierarchy of learning experience. This hierarchy posits that the study abroad student's host and home countries are fundamentally different and internally homogeneous; hence immersion in any part of life in the host country teaches students something, whereas other students from their home country do not. Thus this article views privileging immersion as a scale-making practice that highlights the scale of the nation-state as the only unit of meaningful difference. Based on case studies of four American college students studying abroad in the UK, France and Spain in June-July 2011, this article shows that these students valued immersion yet also learned much in the classroom and by spending time with fellow American and other international students, practices disavowed/discouraged by the discourse of immersion. This challenged the hierarchy of learning experience upheld by the discourse of immersion; it as well subverted but also reinforced the discourse's scale-making practice at the nation-state level. By examining these relationships between the hierarchy of learning and scale-making practice, this article shows that study abroad is less about encountering a homogeneous host society or producing “global citizens” than about learning to relate to people at the intersections of various regimes of difference.