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Recent scholarship across a range of disciplines has sought to understand how people’s relationship with place is increasingly produced by their interactions with digital entertainment and communications media. This scholarship has pointed to the capacity of social media to foster new ways of experiencing locality, culture and belonging, including for mobile populations and transnational communities. In this article, we draw upon original qualitative research to explore how international students in Australian higher education from China and India use local and transnational media to experience, thus produce, Melbourne as a place. We show how for this generation of international students their senses of both home and Australia are fragmented, deterritorialized and syncretic, woven in and through each other, as the Australia that they inhabit is fundamentally conditioned by the fluctuating mediated co-presence of home, derived from the simultaneity offered by digital media. Such a proposal goes beyond arguments about media’s role in the pluralization and hybridization of places, suggesting a more fundamental transformation in the very meaning of place itself as a result of the experiential ubiquity of transnational media connections.

In this article, the author argues that despite wide-ranging appeal of the discourses of globalization, our modes of thinking and ways of addressing issues of cultural diversity remain trapped within a national framework. The dominant constructions of cultural diversity often overlook the ways in which experiences of diversity now take place in emergent spaces that transcend national borders. Using a number of personal narratives, the author shows how experiences of diversity are now affected by dilemmas, contradictions and risks increasingly associated with multiple, dynamic, flexible and intersecting social affiliations. He suggests that this conclusion has major implications for thinking about the requirements of educational policy and practice committed to social inclusion and justice.

In this short article, the author explores the complex relationship between globalization and postcolonialism. He argues that the contemporary processes of globalization are often described in ahistorical terms, whereas much of recent literature on postcolonialism is reduced largely to apolitical analyses of literary texts, disconnected from issues of current and shifting configurations of power. The author argues for the need to understand global processes in education historically and suggests that intellectual postcolonial resources of postcolonialism can be most helpful, but only if postcolonialism is viewed as a political intervention.