Black African international students are already telling us how power operates in higher education. This paper asks whether education research is equipped and willing to listen. It does not position Black African international students (BAIS) as vulnerable populations needing support, nor as case studies through which broader governance failures can be illustrated. Instead, it positions them as the site where power becomes visible. Universities across Europe claim cosmopolitan identities: welcoming, diverse, internationally minded. Yet for BAIS in Scottish higher education, these ideals coexist with hostile immigration regimes, racialised institutional cultures, colonial legacies, and governance structures that reproduce the inequalities they claim to address. Power operates quietly through policy, institutional norms, and societal narratives about belonging, but it becomes visible when examined through the experiences of those who live within its contradictions.

This paper asks: how do BAIS, as people who live inside these contradictions daily, understand and diagnose the governance systems that shape their higher education experiences? And what does their positional knowledge reveal about the deeper structures of power that a policy focused analysis alone cannot capture? This question emerges from a growing recognition that governance of international students cannot be understood through policy as neutral instrument operating independently; it is embedded within and shaped by colonial legacies, racialised knowledge systems, media narratives, and institutional cultures (Bhambra et al., 2018). Together, these constitute the cosmopolitan trap: universities pursue internationalisation while governance systems simultaneously reproduce racialised and colonial precarity. BAIS do not simply experience this trap; they expose it, revealing the gap between institutional claims and lived realities.

Theoretically, the research draws on Critical Race Theory, postcolonial scholarship, and Black feminist thought, not as an assemblage of frameworks but as tools performing specific analytic work. Critical Race Theory examines how race operates structurally in institutions claiming neutrality or meritocracy. Postcolonial scholarship traces the historical governance of African students from Commonwealth diplomacy to contemporary hostile environment measures, showing the persistence of colonial power in mobility regimes and knowledge systems (Bhambra, 2014; Mbembe, 2016). Black feminist thought, particularly Patricia Hill Collins’ work on the matrix of domination (Collins, 2000, 2019), provides the conceptual foundation for treating BAIS not as research subjects but as situated knowledge producers. Those navigating intersecting systems of power, race, class, nationality, and mobility develop epistemic privilege, revealing structural contradictions that dominant perspectives cannot see.

The research is situated within the poly-crisis framing of Morin and Kern (1999), in which entangled crises compound rather than operate independently. For BAIS in Scottish universities, hostile immigration policies, colonial legacies, racialised institutional cultures, media narratives about African mobility, and students’ identity negotiations interact to produce compounded effects. BAIS experiences are not peripheral to the poly-crisis; they are a site where it becomes visible. The cosmopolitan trap marks the convergence of these entangled crises and exposes the contradiction between institutional rhetoric and governance practice.

This paper contributes to the conference theme of Knowing and Acting by asking: whose knowledge counts? Understanding power in higher education governance, particularly during a poly-crisis, requires listening to those for whom power is lived and not just abstract. By centring BAIS as epistemic authorities, the paper argues that understanding the poly-crisis in higher education requires expanding what counts as valid knowledge. This move is not only epistemological; it is methodological and political. It insists that those positioned as subjects of governance are often better positioned to diagnose it than those who administer it (Hall & Tandon, 2017; Timmis et al., 2024). BAIS are not waiting to be studied; they are already interpreting the system. This paper takes that seriously.

The research design reflects its epistemological commitments. If BAIS experiences are the site where power becomes visible, then the methods must create genuine space for that visibility, not funnel experience into pre-existing categories. The research combines two methodological strands. The first is a Critical Policy Analysis (CPA) tracing the governance of African students in UK higher education across six phases, from 1948 to the present. Drawing on Bacchi’s (2009) What’s the Problem Represented to Be? approach and Foucauldian genealogy, this strand examines how power operates through successive governance regimes rather than simply documenting policy change. A central analytical insight is that policies governing African students do not replace earlier restrictions but layer upon them. Each phase introduces new conditions without dismantling what preceded it. As a result, BAIS today navigate not a single policy environment but the compounded weight of decades of governance decisions. The concept of accumulative precarity captures how vulnerability intensifies over time as restrictions pile upon restrictions. The CPA therefore provides the structural and historical architecture of power within which contemporary student experiences are situated. The second strand centres participatory data collection with BAIS and recent graduates at Glasgow universities and comprises two methods: informal narrative interviews and participatory zine-making workshops. Narrative interviews are deliberately open-ended and non-structured, allowing participants to define what is significant in their own experiences. This is a methodological choice with epistemological stakes. If lived experience is treated as theory-making rather than raw data, then the interview cannot impose an external framework or analytic hierarchy onto participant accounts. Zine making workshops are selected for their capacity to resist conventional academic knowledge hierarchies (Biagioli et al., 2021). Zines are multimodal, enabling participants to combine text, image, collage, and narrative. This allows expression of dimensions of experience such as contradiction, resistance, identity, and ambivalence that may not be fully captured through words alone. Zines are not treated as illustrative artefacts but as sites of knowledge production where participants can hold multiple meanings simultaneously and retain authorship over representation. Data collection is ongoing. Analysis will attend to how the two strands speak to one another, not by using student voices to illustrate what the CPA already found, but by examining where they converge, where they diverge, and where student experiences reveal dimensions of power that policy genealogy alone cannot capture.

The research is expected to produce three outcomes, each connected to the central argument that BAIS experiences are the site where power in higher education governance becomes visible. First, the paper will show that governance of international students cannot be understood through policy analysis alone. The CPA demonstrates how power operates through accumulative precarity, layers of restriction compounding over time. But policy documents do not reveal how that power is experienced, negotiated, or resisted. The participatory data is expected to surface dimensions of power, racialised institutional cultures, colonial assumptions embedded in how knowledge and belonging are defined, the entanglement of immigration policy with everyday campus life, that the policy genealogy can only gesture towards. Second, the paper will make a methodological argument about the diagnostic capacity of positional knowledge. By treating zine making and narrative interview not as supplementary data collection but as epistemologically valid sites of knowledge production, the research challenges the assumption that policy analysis is the primary lens through which higher education governance should be understood. BAIS are not data sources. They are interpreters of the system they live inside. The methods are designed to honour that. This is expected to generate findings that are not simply about what BAIS experience, but about what their ways of knowing reveal regarding the governance systems under examination. Third, the paper will contribute to the poly-crisis discourse by demonstrating how entangled systems of power, policy, colonialism, institutional culture, media, identity, compound rather than operate in isolation. This is not a theoretical claim. It will be grounded in what participants reveal through interviews and zines about how these systems land in their daily lives, and in what that visibility tells us about the governance of higher education in a poly-crisis moment.

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