Discourses on (Inter)Nationalization in Scottish Higher Education: Revealing Relationships Between Power, Knowledge, and the Postcolonial

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Nation State, the Rise of Popul(ar)ism, and Curricula of Global Citizenship

Abstract

Many Scottish universities are relentlessly marching forward with their plans to internationalise. These plans can range from building so-called ‘branch’ campuses in the Middle East and Far East to increasing their recruitment activities, aiming to attract as many high fee-paying international students as possible to attend the ‘mothership’ campuses in the Scotland. However, this fierce intensification of (inter)nationalization-type activities has led to a plurality of interpretations of what (inter)nationalization could and should be, with little consideration given to who controls the discourses and what effect this could have. The purpose of this paper is to attempt to reveal the intricate relationships between power and knowledge in order to understand what has become accepted as regimes of truth (Foucault, 1977) within the discourses concerning (inter)nationalization.
To enable this, a critical postcolonial theorisation works in tandem with a Foucauldian approach in uncovering the relations of power discursively at work and the discursive effects of power in institutional terms. This methodological approach brings attention to the affective, ethical and justice-oriented effects of power/knowledge interstices. Said (1978) highlights the epistemological and cultural dimensions of colonial domination, and with a notably Foucauldian influence, illuminates the tight relationship between colonial knowledge and power (Gandhi 1998, Lary 2006).
The aim of employing a Foucauldian discourse analysis is to interrogate the dynamics of the affective and ethical in how relationships between power and knowledge are established. This analysis enabled a deeper interrogation of assumptions regarding knowledge generation and diffusion, as well as the positionalities, subjectivities, and ideologies construed through (inter)nationalization discourses in HE in Scotland A critical postcolonial theorisation facilitates the interpretability of power dynamics through and beyond (inter)nationalization in HE to consider the ethical effects of such power in its investments in global inequality, injustice and oppression within the global modernist imaginary (Guion Akdağ and Swanson, 2017).
The data under consideration includes several documents concerning (inter)nationalization and (inter)nationalization strategy, published online on various Scottish HE institutions’ websites. The results of the analysis of this data identify and critically discuss a number key themes within the documents. In doing so, an overwhelming amount of managerial, neoliberal and nationalistic discourse is revealed. The analysis for this paper is carried out as part of an ongoing EIHE study into the ethics of (inter)nationalization. The Ethical Internationalism in Higher Education in Times of Crises (EIHE) is a 23 institution, 11 country comparative study that was funded by the Academy of Finland (2012 – 2016).
The discussion in this paper is significant as it demonstrates that a lack of critical engagement with (inter)nationalization discourses in Higher Education and has the effect of reifying a dominant view and suppressing the emergence of alternative discourses.

Author

• Emma Guion Akdag, Heriot-Watt University