The Dark Imaginary of the Internationalized University: Inequalities and Immobilities

• In Event: Interrogating Imaginaries and Inequalities in Global Higher Education: Post-foundational Perspectives

Proposal

Internationalization has become a key feature of higher education institutions (HEIs) worldwide today. As Foskett (2010) writes, “Internationalization reaches to the heart of the very meaning of ‘university’ and into every facet of its operation, from teaching and education to research and scholarship, to enterprise and innovation and to the culture and ethos of the institution” (p. 37). The concept of internationalization has been defined similarly by different authors in normative ways focusing on the rationales, strategies and policies associated with internationalizing the university. This paper works from the assumption that internationalization is the expansion of the spatiality of the university beyond borders through mobilities of students, scholars, knowledge, programs, and providers (Larsen, 2016).
First, drawing upon mobilities and spatial theories, I map out the various ways that HEIs have been internationalized through enhanced forms of mobility. Post-foundational spatial and mobilities theories allow us to see how mobile students, academics, knowledge, programs, and providers are enmeshed in knowledge networks that both enable and constrain possible individual and institutional actions. Through these new, transnational forms and processes, the spatial landscape of higher education is transformed
Second the paper focuses specifically upon the inequalities and immobilities produced through and by internationalizing processes. This is what I call the ‘dark imaginary’ of the internationalized university. I examine student and faculty mobility to not only show the heightened spatiality of the internationalized university, but also how exclusions and patterns of inequality are produced through the mobility of some and immobility of others.
Finally, power relations are central to this analysis of international mobility exclusions. As Beverley Skeggs (2004) explains, “[m]obility and control over mobility both reflect and reinforce power. Mobility is a resource to which not everyone has an equal relationship” (p. 49). This focus on mobility exclusions necessitates tracking the power of discourses and practices of mobility in creating mobility and immobility. Structures and systems make mobility possible for some and impossible for others. Mobility is available largely to elites, except of course when we are discussing forced mobility (i.e. academics forced to become mobile due to political persecution). Thus, the analysis attends to questions such as who is able to be mobile and who is not? What are the effects of both immobility and forced mobility on the international academic/scholar and the internationalized university? I consider recent cases associated with the forced mobility of scholars from Syria and the forced immobility of scholars from Turkey as examples of the ‘dark side’ of higher education internationalization.

References:

Foskett, N. H. (2010) Global Markets, National Challenges, Local Responses: The Strategic Challenge of Internationalization. In F. Maringe and N. Foskett (Eds.) Globalization and Internationalization in Higher Education: Theoretical, Strategic and Management Perspectives (pp. 35-50). London: Continuum.

Larsen, M. (2016). Internationalization of Higher Education: An Analysis through Spatial, Network, and Mobilities Theories. Palgrave: New York.

Skeggs, B. (2004). Class, Self and Culture. London: Routledge.

Author

• Marianne Larsen, Western University