Study abroad and environmental collapse. Rethinking academic tourism in the p-COVID era - A provocation

This article considers mobility for study and research purposes from an ecocritical point of view, scrutinizing ideological weddedness to travel as a uniquely formative educational experience and the concomitant resistance to and lack of investment in the exploration of net-zero alternative possibilities. This analysis does not make any comparative claims about the quality of knowledge acquired with and without Study Abroad (SA), as this is a moot point. A recent comparative study has indeed found that “Comparisons of the speaking proficiency outcomes by language and training levels revealed a relatively consistent gap in mean gain levels across languages, with participants in the virtual groups attaining on average one proficiency sub-level lower in speaking gains than their respective face-to-face counterparts.” However, the same study found that “[c]omparisons of reading, listening, and writing outcomes, however, showed smaller differences, sometimes none at all.”