A review of Crip Genealogies, edited by Mel Y. Chen, Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, and Julie Avril Minich, Duke University Press, 2023.
Crip Genealogies is an anthology of texts that claim the pejorative word crip as a moniker to distance themselves from earlier contributions in the field of disability studies. Crip is a diminutive for “cripple” and is used as a slur to designate people with visible forms of disabilities, mostly physical and mobility impairments. It is also a word associated with violence and ghetto culture, as the Crips are one of the largest and most violent associations of street gangs in Los Angeles. Reclaiming crip as a definition of self-identity is a way to return the stigma against the verbal offenders and to express pride in being a member of the disability community. In the academic world, it is also a way to carve a niche for critical disability studies and to express solidarity with non-normative forms of living that may also include queerness and ethnic pride. Symptomatic of this convergence between academic currents and social movements is the proliferation of acronyms to designate minoritarian identities that may be based on sexual orientation and gender identity (LGBTQ+), race and ethnicity (BIPOC, pronounced “bye-pock,” which stands for Black, Indigenous, and people of color), mental health and physical disability (MMINDS, an acronym which stands for Mad, “mentally ill,” neurodivergent, disabled, survivor), or an intersection thereof (SDQTBIPOC, which stands for sick and disabled, queer and trans non-white persons). Most contributors to Crip Genealogies are part of this extensive community and define themselves as queer persons of color, diversely abled, and straddling the line between scholarship and activism. The publication is meant to provide foundational basis for crip theory as a discipline opposed to the apolitical and normative aspects of disability studies and that is “disrupting the established histories and imagined futures of the field.”
Crip ancestors
A genealogy is a history designed to shed light on a person’s origins or a family’s ancestral line. It involves forefathers, ancestors, elders, lineages, progenitors, siblings, cousins, relatives, and descendance. It also build upon myths of origin, narratives of displacement, acts of foundation, coming-of-age stories, acknowledgements of cultural transmission and biological inheritance. In cultural term, a genealogy may include schools of thought, intellectual traditions, disciplinary boundaries, seminal texts, and anthologies or primers. Part of the motivation of many contributors to this volume is to palliate the lack of ancestors and role models they can turn to when they try to ground their scholarly and activist practices. “Where are our queer elders?”, ponder two activists during a panel discussion in which they are asked to name their “crip ancestors.” The lack of obvious answers (beyond the figures of Frida Kahlo, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa) leads them to reflect on “the conditions that will allow disabled QTBIPOC elderhood to flourish,” some of which having to do with the avoidance of premature death, social exhaustion, cultivated marginality, and academic bickering. But the main responsibility for the invisibility of the crip queer-of-color subject falls on the cultivated whiteness of disability studies as an academic discipline and of disability rights as a social movement. According to Sami Schalk, “the early disability rights movement was often very white, middle-class, and single-issue focused.” Leslie Frye considers “how investments in whiteness that underwrite US disability rights have been obscured and where the traces of this movement’s racial legacy lie.” Investments in “making the cripple visible” led to the invisibilization of race, gender, sexuality, and all the other axes of individual or collective identity. The editor’s intention is therefore to underscore “not only the whiteness of the field but also the way in which it both stays white and perpetuates whiteness.”
Histories of social movements often involve a succession of “waves” or the passing of the baton from one cause to the other. One refers to “third-wave feminism” or the “third wave of the civil rights movement” to describe the succession of challenges that feminism or the fight against racial discrimination had to face, in a linear progression that goes from oppression and alienation to self-determination and enlightenment. Likewise, the fight for disability rights seems like the logical next step once “we’ve done race/gender/sexuality.” The temporality of disability studies charts a progression from self-awareness and nascent identity to the mobilization for equal access and equal treatment, then the affirmation of pride and visibility, culminating in the disability justice movement and crip theory. It is believed that recognizing disability history will inspire persons with disabilities to feel a greater sense of pride, reduce harassment and bullying, and help keep students with disabilities in schools or universities. The authors reject such genealogies built around change, progress, and modernity. They refuse to engage in celebratory commemorations of disabled people’s advancement punctuated by legislative victories, from the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 to the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, and the Affordable Care Act of 2010. They are critical of the term “genealogy” itself, which creates “the illusion of descent as a line,” or of metaphors of genealogical trees, epistemological roots, native soil, and disciplinary fields, which inscribe “colonial temporalities and spatialities into our conceptions of scholarship.” ”Even the rhizome can be colonial,” they note in the introduction. Their ambition is to build “epistemologies of radicalized disability that do not comply with compulsory improvement, personal initiative, and change on the way to a good life.” The mixed genealogies they call forth need to “stay with the trouble” and nurture crip theory’s revolutionary potential: “crip disrupts convention and undermines social norms.” Not unlike what the deinstitutionalization movement did for people locked up in hospital wards and collective homes, crip genealogies deconstruct all aspects of institutions.
A new wave of deinstitutionalization
Deinstitutionalization is a political and a social process which provides for the shift from institutional care and other isolating and segregating settings to independent living. The Independent Living philosophy is based on the assumption that people with disabilities should have the same civil rights, options, and control over choices in their own lives, as do people without disabilities. Crip Genealogies advocates a new wave of deinstitutionalization. The institutions under consideration are mostly academic: the authors grapple with the place of disability studies, and of crip theory as a nascent discipline, within the space of the North American university. The university’s dependency on diversity and inclusiveness is something both to be valued and criticized: according to Mel Y. Chen, “disability can confer a selective entitlement, or reveal an interior hierarchization.” Some forms of behaviors or modes of teaching and learning are valued over others: “in the university, agitated gesture—whether in the form of politically legible protest, aggressive physicality, or movement (including stillness or slowness) inopportune to class habitus—has no proper home, save perhaps in the possibilities of dance training or intramural sport.” For scholars coming from abroad, such as Eunjung Kim, “the institutional legitimacy in US academia came with a price, as it valued certain kinds of writing and thinking over others.” The unmarked human who embodies all scholarly virtues and properties continues to be “white, non disabled, masculine, ‘functionally’ social, and creditable.” “Academia, ableist to its core, rejects disability in its love for abilities.” The result, for scholars who don’t fit, is a feeling that they don’t really belong. This feeling is shared by the four editors: ”as the four of us worked together, we all confessed feelings of inadequacy to each other.” The “academic impostor syndrome” noted by Julie Avril Minich combines with a “disability impostor syndrome”: “I know I am not the only disability scholar to feel, constantly and simultaneously, both not academic enough and not crip enough.” But in the end, writes Alison Kafer, “we owe our loyalties to people, not to institutions.”
The authors are also critical of the disability rights movement as it has been institutionalized. Focusing its demands on self-determination, legal rights, and non-discrimination, the disability rights movement led to the advancement of disabled people who were considered as “good citizens” (white, heterosexual, and affluent) at the expense of others (non-white, queer, and poor). Nor did it question the fact that belonging to the working class or to an ethnic minority are factors that promote disabilities: precariousness, which affects a large part of these categories, is one of the main causes of disability because it comes with degraded, even dangerous living conditions and limited access to healthcare. People of color and queer people of color are often confronted with stigmatizing diagnoses of disability, such as “mental retardation” or “gender identity disorder,” whereas white people tend to receive less negatively connoted diagnoses, such as “attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder” (ADHD) or “gender dysphoria.” Historically, pejorative labels were often used by public authorities with a view to disqualifying immigrants, African-Americans, the poor, but also women whose “debility” was a major argument for sterilization (including white women whose behavior corrupted whiteness). This explains why minority rights movements have often perceived the need to distance themselves from disability in order to avoid being further stigmatized, involuntarily contributing to making queer people-of-color with disabilities invisible (this is by no means general: Sami Schalk claims the Black Panther Party has been an early supporter of disability rights.) It is this invisibilization that the disability justice movement tries to repair, by taking a close interest in intersectionality and also in mental disorders, which are also marginalized by the disability rights movement. For Tari Young-Jung Na, writing from the perspective of South Korea, the deinstitutionalization movement must expand into a movement for the liberation of nonnormative beings in society, including transgender people, sex workers, people living with HIV/AIDS, and other victims of “incarceration without walls.”
Decentering disability
The editors of Crip Genealogies made a laudable effort to include perspectives coming from outside the United States. The anthology contains chapters reflecting viewpoints or evidence from South Korea, Palestine, Vietnam, Kenya, the Czech Republic, the Philippines, and Australia. One of the contribution was written in Korean and translated into English, thereby contributing to a distancing from Anglosphere imperialism, although the editors acknowledge they included too few references in languages other than English in their bibliography. The article from South Korea indeed shows that modernity is not always synonymous with the West: in Korea, it came from neighboring Japan, both during the imperial occupation with the isolation of Hansen’s disease patients, and in more recent years with the import of the Independent Living movement through seminars and training. For Jasbir Puar, settler colonialism is very much alive in the West Bank, where a “number of Palestinians are maimed by Israel on a daily basis” and a policy of extreme spatial regulation keeps an entire population in a debilitating chokehold. The analysis of a dance film, Rhizophora, featuring young patients affected by Agent Orange in a Vietnam Friendship Village, demonstrates “the possibility of queering and cripping chemical kinships that exist as alternatives to normative familial structures.” Faith Njahîra, who lives with muscular dystrophy, discovered late in childhood that she was disabled: growing up in Kenya, she experienced no markers of difference during primary school except remarks about her “walking style” and invocation of “chest problems” to limit participation in physical education. Kateřina Kolářová, who positions herself as a feminist, queer and crip scholar, reminds us that whiteness takes a different value in postsocialist Eastern Europe, where it is reproduced in conjunction with the pathologization of Roma people. Sony Coráñez Bolton uses the concept of “supercrip,” disabled individuals believed to have superior abilities to compensate their impairment, to analyze a novel written in Spanish by mestizo Filipino José Reyes. Mel Y. Chen describes a site-specific work of art by Indigenous Australian artist Fiona Foley installed in the Queensland State Library in Brisbane. Coming back to America, ethnic minority perspectives are offered on Asian Americans whose illness punctuates the myth of the”model minority”; an experimental zine project by a self-identified “queer crip Chicanx/Tejanx single mother” in South Texas; and the activism of the Black Panther Party as a precursor to today’s disability justice movement.
Assembling this edited volume in times of COVID-19 took place under the shadow of home confinement, city lock-downs, overcrowded hospitals, mandated teleworking, and Zoom conferences. For scholars critically engaged with disability studies, there are several lessons to draw from this pandemic. Because COVID-19 is associated with old age, fragility of the immune system, respiratory problems, or other health concerns, there is a worrying tendency to treat the lives of those most at risk as less valuable, as more or less expendable. Triage in hospitals became the most terrifying illustration of the hierarchy of human lives, between lives worthy of living and lives left to die. For Achille Mbembe, to kill or to let live, or “to make live and let die,” are the principal attributes of the sovereign state. As disability studies have shown, many disabled persons already experience a kind of social death. The coronavirus crisis has only provided an infallible justification for this death, making it more physical than social. At the same time, the pandemic situation and the imposed lockdowns made whole populations experience what is in fact only a banal fact of life or a permanent condition for millions of people living with disabilities. Being condemned to stay at home because public space is not accessible, facing shortages of beds and medical equipment in hospitals overloaded with patients, having to rely on social media to maintain a network of friends and relatives: all these situations sound familiar for a part of the population overlooked by public policies. As Jasbir Puar notes, “what has been widely fetishized as ‘pandemic time’ is actually what ‘crip time’ has always been—never on time, waiting out time, needing more time, unable to keep up with time, forced time at home, too long a waiting time.” The rapid development of remote working and videoconference, which has long been requested by people with disabilities to facilitate their participation in the economy and society, shows that a previously unsurmountable challenge becomes suddenly feasible once it is perceived as the only solution to continue to run the country’s economy and allow able-bodied people to carry out their activities. The authors remind us that “texting, now used by everyone, was created as assistive technology for Deaf people.” Likewise, videoconferencing can be considered as a crip technology.
Pertinence and impertinence
I realize my review may fall within “the reductive and extractive citational practices” that the authors criticize in their introduction. Why do I take an interest in crip theory, and why do I think this intellectual endeavor needs to be known beyond a small circle of social activists and academic pundits? Simply put, because of the pertinence of the question it raises, but also on behalf of the impertinence with which it addresses issues of pressing concern. The pertinence, or relevance, of crip theory seems obvious. The question of gender and sexuality, of race and identity, of minorities and rights, are at the center of contemporary debates. As Crip Genealogies makes it clear, the terms “queer” or “crip” are not limited to questions of gender or disability: from the moment we deviate from the norm, we are no longer really “straight” or “fit” even if we are otherwise heterosexual, able-bodied, or white. Disability justice activists, claiming the impossibility to achieve normality, suggest imagining new social configurations, new solidarity movements, a new public sphere which would not base participation in social life on abilities or capacities. The impertinence, or irreverence, of crip theory is just as remarkable. Crip Genealogies is relatively measured in this respect. To the more radically inclined, I recommend the reading of Testo Junkie by the transgender activist and philosopher Paul B. Preciado. Subtitled Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era in its English edition, it chronicles the author’s multifaceted and liminal experience taking testosterone and other pharmaceutical drugs as a political and performative act in order to undo all normative categories of gender, health, and ableness. Despite the obvious provocations, there can be something stimulating and positive about a crip theory approach. It allows us to desacralize, if need be, the discourse on disability and ableness, to remind us of its human character – not halfway but through and through. Disability studies share with ableism a number of implicit, unquestioned assumptions about what is “right” or what is “normal.” Crip theory makes fun of these conveniences, it jostles them cheerfully and not without humor. Again, this will not be to everyone’s taste. But that’s no reason not to listen to what crip theory has to tell us about human beings in their embodied and racialized selves, the way gender and ethnicity shape who we are, the forms of injustice that exist in relation to people who do not recognize themselves in the heteronormativity and whiteness inherent in our culture. Crip theory is here to stay, and should be engaged with a positive and open mind.
My Japanese alma mater, Keio University at Shonan Fujisawa, has a Faculty of Environment & Information. Next to it stands a Graduate School of Media & Governance. Putting two distant words together, like “environment” and “information” or “media” and governance”, creates new perspectives and innovative research questions while breaking boundaries between existing disciplines. Yuriko Furuhata uses the same approach in Climatic Media. What is climatic media? How did media become articulated with climate in the specific context of Japan? In what sense can we consider the climate, and atmospheric phenomena, as media? What new research questions arise when we put the two words “climate” and “media” together? Which disciplines are summoned, and how are they transformed by the combination of climate and media? How does climatic media relate to Watsuji Tetsurō’s concept of Fūdo, to take the title of his 1935 book translated as Climate and Culture? Can we use certain media to manage the climate, to predict and to control it? What is the genealogy of these technologies of atmospheric control, and can we trace them back to previous projects of territorial expansion and imperial hegemony? If we call “thermostatic desire” the desire to control both interior and exterior atmospheres, how does this desire “scale up” from air-conditioned rooms to smart buildings, district cooling systems, domed cities, geoengineering initiatives, orbital space colonies, and terraformed planets? In what sense can we say that air conditioning is people conditioning? These are some of the questions that Yuriko Furuhata raises in her book, which I found extremely stimulating. My review won’t provide a summary of the book’s chapters or an assessment of its contribution to the field of media studies, but will rather convey a personal journey made through Climatic Media and, indirectly, back to my formative years at Keio SFC.
Is there a pathway that goes “from information theory to French Theory”? Straying away from the familiar itineraries of intellectual history, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan invites us to take a path less trodden: a detour that allows the reader to revisit famous milestones in the development of cybernetics and digital media, and to connect them to scholarly debates stemming from fields of study as distant as structural anthropology, family therapy, and literary semiology. Detours and shortcuts are deviations from linear progression, reminding the traveler that there is no one best way to reach a point of destination. Similarly, there are several ways to read this book. One is to start from the beginning, and proceed until the end, from the birth of communication science during the Progressive Era in the United States to the heydays of French seminars in sciences humaines in the Quartier latin before mai 68. Another way is to start from the conclusion, “Coding Today”, and to read the whole book in reverse order as a genealogy of the cultural analytics used today by big data specialists and modern codifiers of culture. A third approach would be to start from the fifth and last chapter on “Cybernetics and French Theory” and to see how casting cultural objects in terms of codes, structures, and signifiers relates to previous methodologies of treating communication as information, signals, and patterns. The common point of these three approaches to reading Code is to emphasize the crossing of boundaries: disciplinary boundaries between technical sciences and the humanities; political demarcations between social engineering and cultural critique; and transatlantic borders between North America and France. The gallery of scientists and intellectuals that the book summons is reflective of this broad sweep: Norbert Wiener, Warren Weaver, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Luce Irigaray are seldom assembled in a single essay; yet this is the challenge that Code raises, inviting us to hold together disciplines and methodologies that are usually kept separate.
“I can’t breathe!” These were the last words uttered by Eric Garner, a Black resident of Staten Island who, on July 17, 2014, was put in a deadly chokehold by an NYPD officer for allegedly selling “loosies” or single cigarettes on the street. Garner suffered from asthma, a condition that, according to epidemiological data, disproportionately affects African Americans. Garner’s last words were also those of Elijah McClain and George Floyd, two other Black men killed by police just a few years later. “I can’t breathe” has become a rallying cry for our times and is used as an expression of the asphyxiating atmosphere in which activists declare that Black Lives Matter. The unability to breathe can be understood as both a metaphor and material reality of racism, which constrains not just life choices and opportunities, but the environmental conditions of life itself. It draws our attention to breathing as a political act: the capacity to breathe, or its preclusion, defines a new form of biopolitics in which some lives are deemed worthy of inhaling fresh air and some aren’t. Reclaiming ownership of the means of respiration, literally and figuratively, may delineate a new kind of respiratory politics that recognizes breathing as an unalienable right. For Jean-Thomas Tremblay, an art critic and professor of environmental humanities, breathing is, more than ever, in the air. Of course, breathing is in the air. But it specifically is, now, in the Zeitgeist. It is a sign of the times that breathing’s intensity and its variations—submitting breathing subjects to chokehold or waterboarding, refraining from inhaling certain substances, filtering inhaled air through face masks, measuring one’s carbon dioxide emissions—now feature in our political imaginary as an expression of agency and control. For Jean-Thomas Tremblay, the crisis in breathing predates the climate urgency, the Covid-19 epidemic, or the BLM movement. He sees its emergence and intensification around the 1970s, and tracks its expression in marginal, underground, or minoritarian art productions that may have escaped the radar screen of art historians but that, more than mainstream creations or popular art, may help us to capture what is at stake in the current inability to breathe.
Sound studies can take you to faraway places. Ethnomusicology, the study of music in its social and cultural contexts, has taught us to lend an ear to songs and musical genres performed by people distant from Western cultures and mainstream musical practices. In Radiation Sounds, Jessica Schwartz takes her readers to the Marshall Islands, an independent microstate in the Pacific, to listen to the distant echoes and silences brought forth by the nuclear testings that took place at the onset of the Cold War. From 1946 through 1958, the United States conducted 67 nuclear tests on islands and atolls now composing the Republic of Marshall Islands (RMI). Symbolized by the strong visual of the mushroom cloud, these nuclear detonations included the 15-megaton Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test on March 1, 1954, which led to the unexpected radioactive contamination of areas to the east of Bikini Atoll. The United States organized forcible relocations from the atolls made uninhabitable by the nuclear fallout, kept a moratorium on all information pertaining to the nuclear arms race, and submitted exposed populations without their consent to medical examination on the effects of radiations in a program code-named Project 4.1. Marshallese music and voices still carry the echoes of these nuclear explosions as they radiate through local politics, radio broadcasts, musical performances, folk songs, contaminated soils, and ailing bodies. Radiation Sounds gives equal importance to sounds and to silence, to music and to noise, to songs and to oral testimonies. It considers not only soundwaves, but also radio waves, oceanic waves, and nuclear radiations made sensible through the audible clicks of Geiger counters and the crackled voices of remembrance songs. It addresses the full spectrum of electromagnetic wavelengths while staying attuned to their sociopolitical dimension. A nuclear blast is not only a visual flash: its delayed sound effect and ionizing radiations produce more lasting consequences, including for the voices that it smothers and the silence that is forced onto all parties.
Brian Massumi owes his career to his ability to translate obscure texts into plain English, and to his penchant for doing the reverse. His first notoriety came from bringing Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus to an English-speaking audience. Without him, what became an essential text for feminists, literary theorists, social scientists, philosophers, and avant-garde artists may have remained a local event, known only to the francosphere. His meticulous translation from French into English proved that translating untranslatable language constitutes a challenge, not an impossibility. He may have understood Deleuze and Guattari’s work better than they understood it themselves: going through the detour of a foreign language allowed the text to shed some of its obscurities, and to take on new ones as the translator engaged in his own rap and wordplays. Meaning always exceeds linguistic conventions contained in national boundaries and syntaxic rules. In this case, the obscure clarity of A Thousand Plateaus inspired many creators beyond the field of continental philosophy. References to Deleuze and Guattari’s work can be found in literary artworks, blockbuster movies, electronic music, and even in financial theory and military thinking. Massumi was both a translator and an interpreter of Deleuzian philosophy: his User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia remains the most accessible and playful introduction to one of the major intellectual achievements of the late twentieth century. If, as Michel Foucault prophesied, the twenty-first century will be Deleuzian, it will be in no small part thanks to Brian Massumi and to his role as a translator and a go-between.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These truths are no longer self-evident: few people now believe in a Creator ; the inclusion of women in the generic term “all men” has to be specified ; and rights in their modern acceptation are not endowed or bestowed, but conquered and defended. What about Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness? Are they not the expression of an American ideology that is shared by few people, even in the United States? Life itself has become a contested issue, as it hinges on when life starts and ends and some people are claiming a right to death in order to exit life with dignity. The pursuit of happiness was a central theme in Hollywood comedies of the 1930s and 1940s—a time of great unhappiness—, but we now look at these black-and-white motion pictures with nostalgia and irony, while Hollywood has moved to other descriptions of people’s aspirations and beliefs. Most significantly, freedom now has a hollow ring. The “Liberty Bell” march or the “Battle Cry of Freedom” were calls to rally round the flag and show patriotism, but these battle songs were used to legitimate wars of aggression and imperialism that made freedom a mockery of justice and equality. Domestically, the “land of the free” has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. We now speak with less assurance than our forefathers about the rights and values enshrined in declarations of independence or bills of rights. What if they were wrong in proclaiming life, liberty and happiness as our guiding principles? What if the reverse was true? What if freedom was not universally desirable, but “ugly” and repulsive? This is the argument that Elisabeth Anker makes in her book Ugly Freedoms, as she invites us to challenge self-evident truths and commonly believed assumptions.
Reading Dreams of Flight made me reexamine my preconceptions about Australia, China, and university studies abroad. When I was a graduate student in France back in the early 1990s, I didn’t identify Australia as a land of opportunity for academic studies. In the disciplines that I have studied, Australia is (or was) a scientific backwater, an outlier when compared to North America or Western Europe. I don’t trust university rankings that much, but last time I checked Australian universities ranked quite low in terms of research output, number of Nobel Prizes, well-identified schools of thought, or emerging paradigms. I was under the impression that an academic career in an Australian institution was a second- or third-best choice for aspiring scholars who failed to land the position of their dreams in North America or in Europe. Spending more than a decade in East Asia made me revise that opinion. I have met many Asian scholars for whom Australia was definitely on the academic map. For a prospective graduate student in South Korea, in Taiwan, or in South-East Asia, pursuing a degree in Australia, applying for a faculty position, or doing research as a post-doctoral student in an Australian university are serious options to consider. Australia’s attractiveness is not only linked to geographical proximity. Language, lifestyle, natural environment, diasporic presence, and academic freedom in well-funded research universities also weigh in the decision for an academic destination. Besides, the international students who form the focus of Dreams of Flight—a cohort of about fifty young Chinese women that the author follows across the full cycle of international study between 2012 and 2020—did not wish to pursue an academic career in science or in the humanities. Their ambition was to acquire a degree in a practical field such as accounting, finance, or communication and media studies, to broaden their horizon by getting an experience of living and studying abroad, and to follow a career marked by international mobility and promotion opportunities. Australian universities could build on these expectations to attract a growing number of students from China: in December 2019, just before Covid, there were over 212,000 Chinese students studying in Australia. Students from China represented the largest proportion of international students, while Australia was the third foreign destination for Chinese students after the United States and the United Kingdom.
The Duke Reader 