Translocality and agency for social change: short-term international student mobility from Southeast Asia to the United States

While research on short-term international student mobility has focused on learning, intercultural development and employability, this article examines how structured programmes become connected to participants’ agency for social change by drawing on interviews with twelve alumni from six Southeast Asian countries who completed the five-week US-based Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative Academic Fellowship Program (YSEALI-AFP). Bringing Archer’s account of reflexivity into dialogue with translocality, the analysis shows how participants connected concerns, commitments and projects rooted in their biographies and home localities with knowledge, practices, institutional arrangements and relationships encountered across programme sites. Participants reflexively assessed and selectively adapted these resources in relation to local conditions. Three trajectories emerged: locally embedded adaptation, role-mediated redirection, and sustaining commitment. The article develops a translocal account of how short-term mobility enters the practices, roles and relationships through which participants pursue locally situated social-change work.