In 2014, South Korea launched Incheon Global Campus (IGC), a shared campus where multiple international branch campuses operate together as a consortium of colleges. English is
the medium of instruction at IGC, and each member university has autonomous control over the
curriculum, staffing, faculty, and admissions of their individual branch campus. The aim of IGC
is to provide Korean students with an affordable alternative to traditional study abroad sojourns
by allowing students to essentially study abroad in situ. This goal is particularly notable given
how South Korea has long served as a primary source country for international students studying
abroad in other countries.
The South Korean students who attend IGC are uniquely involved in a grand social
experiment which complicates our understanding of international education. What does it mean
when higher education institutions cross borders, circumventing the need for students to do so?
Unfortunately, there has been a lack of attention to this phenomenon, not only in terms of
empirical studies, but also in terms of critical theorizing regarding this novel type of
international/transnational education and its impact on the student experience. IGC students are
clearly different from the rest of the native student population since they are not attending a
South Korean university, yet they are not quite “international” either since they do not travel
overseas and instead remain immersed in their home environments. In short, they occupy a third
space that is simultaneously international and domestic since they are essentially “going global at
home”.
This study explores the nature of student experiences in this liminal space, and the extent
to which this transnational context symbolizes education’s potential to be a either a tool for
social reproduction or social mobility. In these unique transnational spaces, students mobilize
capital, especially linguistic capital, in ways that highlight a global dimension to Bourdieu’s
theory of social fields and social reproduction.