Higher Education Internationalization Through an Equity-Driven Lens

• In Event: Approaches to Equity-Driven Internationalization Scholarship in Higher Education

Abstract

Purpose and Significance
Extant scholarship makes clear that values and culture are enacted and privileged through HE internationalization processes (i.e., Knight, 2003, 2012). However, while some scholars have sought to mitigate this privileging by developing a values-neutral construction of internationalization in research, we argue that investigating values, agendas, and ideologies should be at the forefront of internationalization research. In response, we created an equity-driven internationalization lens, which can serve as a tool for centering equity in HE internationalization research and engaging in scholarship that reimagines the purpose, processes, and outcomes of internationalization. Our presentation will discuss how we developed the lens and used it to analyze and critique extant HE internationalization scholarship. We will also offer recommendations for how future researchers can apply the lens to their own work. The lens is used as a framework that connects the other symposium presentations.
Perspectives and Approach
An equity lens assumes that education institutions and their processes are not neutral and “makes explicit the political nature of education and how power operates to privilege, silence, and marginalize individuals who are differently located in the educational process” (Ng, 2003, p. 214). Our development of the lens was informed by our initial review of the literature, in which we foregrounded the broad concepts of equity and inequity as a way to examine how these concepts were present and missing in extant scholarship. In doing so, we identified the four guiding principles of our lens as the main ways in which scholars engaged (in)equity in their research or called for greater focus on (in)equity in U.S. HE internationalization research.
Equity-driven Internationalization Lens
The lens consists of four guiding principles: (1) Integrating conceptual and theoretical perspectives includes ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions that ultimately frame research design and interpretations of phenomena (Jabareen, 2009). Within the equity-driven lens, it is important to interpret how conceptual/theoretical frameworks in HE internationalization research acknowledge, reinforce, or challenge unbalanced power dynamics and global in/equities. (2) De/constructing internationalization recognizes that internationalization is not just embedded in systems of power; rather, it is a tool used to wield power and therefore cannot be neutral. As a result, researchers should be clear in how they define internationalization while simultaneously interrogating how the definition itself frames their work. (3) Defining the sociohistorical context of internationalization recognizes that contemporary practices in HE cannot be separated from sociohistorical forces that form intricate relationships between coloniality, racial hierarchies, institutionalized racism, globalization, and capitalism, which continue to manifest today in U.S. HE (Dancy et al., 2018; Wilder, 2013). (4) Connecting to contemporary forces of globalization is important because while globalization and internationalization are distinct concepts, they are intertwined. Without the acknowledgement of this interconnectedness, it will wrongly appear as if internationalization occurs in a vacuum or that the motivations driving it are based solely on institutional/individual choice rather than on global systems and structures of power.

Authors

• Chrystal A. George Mwangi, George Mason University

• Christina W Yao, University of South Carolina