International Students as Diversity Projects: Competing Interests in Higher Education Institutions

This dissertation aims to explore the relationships of diversity and internationalization in Higher Education from an institutional level. The project focuses on how colleges and universities construct diversity projects through international students. The project seeks to address three core questions: (1) How are international students included in racial representations by colleges and universities, (2) How do colleges and universities with high and low enrollment of international students represent internationalization and diversity in their institutional websites, and (3) How does an institution with high domestic student racial diversity engage in internationalization. Methods used in the dissertation include digital ethnography, archival content analysis, and in-person ethnographic observations. The dissertation contributes to joining work that has previously been addressed more separately on issues of diversity and internationalization in the Sociology of Higher Education studies and expanding work on international students at the institutional level.