Early September in the 2025–2026 academic year, as in previous years, was marked by excitement and anticipation among teachers and students in the Department of International Studies in Education at the University of Iceland (UI). This moment, however, revealed that such excitement is never guaranteed; it is contingent, fragile, and shaped by how international students are able to navigate the regimes governing their arrival. UI requires international students to be physically present on campus by a specified date. In earlier years, this requirement had not posed a major challenge, as student numbers were lower and the programme retained flexibility to start slightly later, in recognition of the well-documented barriers faced by students from outside the EU/Schengen area related to visa processing and border bureaucracies (Liu 2024).

In 2025, however, in an effort to align the programme with a universal start date, UI initially attempted to revoke the enrolment of students whose residence permits had not yet been issued, despite these students having submitted all required documentation to the relevant authorities in a timely manner. Although the university was aware of a 30% increase in international applications as early as February 2025, it did not coordinate with affected departments or faculties to adjust programme timelines, nor did it notify the Directorate of Immigration (DoI) of the increased demand for student permits. While the students were ultimately permitted to enrol, the delay produced prolonged uncertainty, leaving their educational trajectories and futures in limbo.

Drawing on this case, the paper develops the concept of epistemic bordering as a form of violence enacted at the intersection of higher education and migration regimes. The internationalisation of higher education (Halldórsdóttir & Gollifer 2018) is deeply entangled with migration governance (Jacobsen et al. 2021; Wyss 2022), epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007; Anderson 2012), and whiteness (Ahmed 2007). We show that, while UI’s strategic plan emphasises inclusion and internationalisation, higher education remains embedded within migration regimes that generate exclusion and subtler forms of violence by (re)producing territorial and epistemic boundaries between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ knowledge.

We argue that higher education in the Global North—widely regarded as intellectually valuable and desirable within former colonial and neoliberal systems—produces epistemic paradigms that define what counts as ‘science’, ‘expert knowledge’, ‘intellectual property’, and the ‘authorised codes of academic communication’ (Torkaman Rad 2023). By foregrounding epistemic bordering as a central form of harm produced through internationalisation, we demonstrate how knowledge hierarchies are formed that “unjustly organise human hierarchies in place and reify uneven geographies in a familiar, seemingly natural way” (McKittrick 2006, p. 33).

Within higher education contexts shaped by racialised politics and asymmetries, these epistemic paradigms sustain hierarchies in which white institutions and white knowledge function as a superstructure. Ahmed’s (2010) concept of happy objects helps illuminate how these institutions and epistemic formations produce affective attachments that render whiteness as the natural site of academic fulfilment and professional success. Consequently, investment in white institutions and white knowledge is framed as necessary for securing a viable future (Shahjahan & Edwards 2022). At the same time, access to this knowledge is restricted, rendered conditional, and unevenly distributed. We argue that international students, particularly those from outside the EU/Schengen area, experienced not only significant material harm through financial, emotional, and intellectual investments—such as costly English language tests, application and registration fees, and housing deposits—but also prolonged uncertainty due to delayed or withheld residence permits (No Border Iceland, 13 September 2025). These experiences constitute a distinct form of harm conceptualised here as epistemic bordering.

This paper adopts a decolonial lens and employs critical discourse analysis (CDA) to examine how migration regimes and higher education institutions produce epistemic bordering and related harms for international students in Iceland. The empirical material consists of publicly available documents and media texts, including reports and statements from Vísir, No Borders Iceland, Morgunblaðið, the Directorate of Immigration, the Icelandic Government, and relevant university and educational policy documents, alongside administrative data. These sources represent key institutional, governmental, and civil society actors involved in regulating international student mobility. The analysis draws on CDA as developed by Fairclough (1989) and van Dijk (2001), understood not only as a methodological tool but as a critical and ethical approach aimed at exposing how language and discourse normalize unequal social relations. Following Fairclough and Fairclough (2013), the study examines how ostensibly neutral administrative and policy discourses contribute to exclusion, harm, and structural violence. Analytically, the study focuses on two themes identified through an initial reading of the material, which were subsequently reanalysed using CDA of representation from a decolonial perspective (Passada 2019). This perspective foregrounds how classificatory and evaluative frameworks produced in the Global North reproduce material and epistemic inequalities and interrogates the epistemological assumptions underpinning knowledge production and policy rationalities (Ahmed Y. 2020).

The study is expected to demonstrate that epistemic bordering operates as a central yet underexamined form of harm within the nexus of migration and higher education. The analysis is likely to show how higher education institutions, embedded within migration regimes, participate in bordering practices that extend beyond territorial exclusion by normalising conditional access to education, knowledge, and academic futures for international students, particularly those from outside the EU/Schengen area. Migration-related requirements—such as visa timelines, language standards, tuition structures, and institutional definitions of academic legitimacy—are expected to function as epistemic filters that unevenly regulate access to valued knowledge and reproduce hierarchies privileging Western, English-centred epistemologies. The findings are also expected to highlight how international students’ experiences of uncertainty, exclusion, and disposability are discursively framed as administrative necessity rather than institutional harm. By foregrounding epistemic bordering, the study contributes empirically and theoretically to critical debates on migration regimes and higher education, while pointing toward the need for epistemic pluralism and decolonising approaches within universities.

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