ABSTRACT. As the world came to a standstill in 2020, my fellow international students and I travelled to Belgium to pursue graduate studies amid the uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic. Living through a crisis in a foreign country disrupted the ‘academic fairytale’ of international mobility and revealed the fragility of institutional support, while opening possibilities for emergent communities of care. This study interrogates the fiction of academic mobility by mobilising the framework of radical care alongside feminist approaches to crisis. Drawing on autoethnography and participant observation, it documents how international women students practised care as a collective survival strategy amid uncertainty. It examines how care was enacted through everyday acts of accompaniment, knowledge-sharing and emotional support, while also tracing the tensions between dependence and autonomy in these relationships. In tracing these experiences, I not only analyse care as a response to institutional failure but also attend to it as a practice of witnessing: to take responsibility for remembering and valuing the ways people sustained one another in the midst of crisis.

Keywords: academic mobility; COVID-19; feminist crisis management; radical care

How to cite: Deocampo, I. J. G. (2026). We are our sisters’ keepers: Mobilising radical care and feminist crisis management in international student mobility and survival during the COVID-19 crisis. Knowledge Cultures, 14(2), 155–170. https://doi.org/10.22381/kc14220268 

Received February 28, 2026 • Received in revised form June 6, 2026
Accepted July 15, 2026 • Available online August 1, 2026