UC Irvine

This dissertation engages the experiences of African international students in Hungary to analyze how mobility, race, and a ‘sense of place’ are produced. Since 2013, Nigerian students have rapidly increased their recruitment and enrollment in Hungarian higher education institutions, demonstrating Hungary’s repositioning within global education markets and African migration circuits. This dissertation project traces how contemporary international student migration develops from the afterlives of socialist worldmaking and Cold War-era, Third World internationalism, now reconfigured through market-oriented education regimes. I argue that the contemporary marketing and recruitment of African students toward international education operates as a form of what I term “propaganda of the future,” projecting narratives of opportunity and development while reproducing global inequities. These developments are analyzed through networks of mobility, including bilateral state agreements, state-sponsored scholarships such as the Stipendium Hungaricum program, and the global logics of international student migration regimes, which frame students as both ‘clients’ and ‘laborers’ within systems of value extraction. This study engages historical materialism and Black geographic methods to question how global inequities are (re)produced and contested. Hungary has been both dominated and dominating across imperial, socialist, and post-socialist formations. I argue that under contemporary illiberal and authoritarian political formations – including those shaping Hungary’s contemporary governance – the conditions of mobility, knowledge production, and everyday life are increasingly constrained through nationalist, racialized, and gendered and classed forms of control. These regimes work to disconnect individuals from embodied, relational modes of being, shaping the terms through which life can be lived and recognized. It is within this terrain of struggle that African students reproduce themselves, enact forms of life-making and Black livingness, creating spaces of connection, care, and creativity through what I call ‘corridors of life-making’. In so doing, I illuminate how diasporic subjects navigate the frictions of racialization, gender, class and nationality while sustaining infrastructures of care and social reproduction that operate alongside (and, often in tension with) the state. By centering the embodied experiences of contemporary African students in Hungary, this research contributes to emerging work in global Black geographies, demonstrating localized examples of what a ‘Black sense of place’ means in historically overlooked, non-Western contexts.