“This book offers an original and critical account of an influential domain of media practice—the “study abroad media culture” through which Americans learn about, experience, and document educational travel abroad. Through deft analysis of diverse types of travel media, including study abroad video contests, “homestay movies,” and student vlogs, Kelly Hankin traces how visions of the “globally engaged student” have emerged from a web of media histories, technologies, institutions, and stakeholders. Media, Hankin convincingly shows us, are central to understanding the fraught politics and transformative potential of international education.”
~Katie Day Good, author of Bring The World to the Child: Technologies of Global Citizenship in American Education
“Kelly Hankin’s wide-ranging and deftly argued analysis of the ‘study abroad gaze’ is a welcome addition to current debates about tourism, travel, and intercultural exchange. She expertly guides us through such diverse topics as theories of mediated travel, reality television and vlogs, the foreign homestay, and the risks and rewards of overseas experiences. The result is an innovative reading of how this formative, multi-layered educational experience for contemporary American students is continually reframed through film and television.”
~Ben McCann, University of Adelaide, Australia
"Documenting the American Student Abroad is a cutting account of exactly how far off the study abroad industry is from forging a media culture, or what Hankin would call a collective visual grammar, that is ethically aligned with the many noble goals the educational field purports to promote. By placing study abroad practices under the scrutiny of analytical tools from media and cultural studies, Hankin renders the familiar unfamiliar: student-made youtube clips become avenues for fresh analysis of gender and race, and rote study abroad safety precautions become texts for questioning just how comfortable Americans really are with the ideals of global citizenship. For those with an interest in media studies, Documenting the American Student Abroad models the importance of close-reading visual texts as easily dismissed and as 'low brow' as an undergraduate's 'Vlog' sent home from abroad. For those concerned with improving the quality of international education, Hankin will provoke a full-on reckoning. Where institutions of study abroad typically see absence, Hankin finds voice. Where study abroad practitioners see accepted everyday communications strategies, Hankin finds troubling pedagogies and ideological presumptions that undermine the very premise of intercultural education. Documenting the American Student Abroad helps us to understand how it is that an educational practice that has been celebrated for an entire century as America's pathway to global redemption has ultimately done so little to shift some of the most stubborn imperialist ideals that underpin our nation's relationship to the world. "
~Talya Zemach-Bersin, Education Studies Senior Capstone Coordinator and a Lecturer, Yale University
~The American Minute podcast
~The New American Baccalaureate Project
