Equal Access to International Debate: Visas and Their Implications

This paper describes the experience of Jordanian student who is studying for a PhD degree in Museum Studies in the UK. She outlines the difficulties that she has met in getting a visa to travel to conferences and feels that the difficulty of obtaining a visa has impacted upon her development as a scholar. One outcome is that she ignored so many conferences and calls for papers because she knew that she could not get a visa in time to attend. She questions why the process of applying for a visa has to be so difficult.