Exploring Faculty Agency as a Framework to Critically Examine Internationalization in the Global South

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday V)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Higher education SIG roundtable 3

Proposal

Through historical patterns of colonization and continued globalization, higher education institutions in the global south seek legitimacy and prestige through mechanisms and structures created by the global north (Altbach, 2003, 2004; Marginson, 2008; Maringe, Foskett, & Woodfield, 2013). These mechanisms place particular pressure on higher education faculty in the global south to internationalize, through international research collaborations (Illeava & Peak, 2016), increased research productivity (Uzuner-Smith & Englander, 2015) and publications within highly ranked, English-medium journals (Chou & Chan, 2017) which ultimately contribute to increased institutional global rankings (Altbach, 2012; Rust & Kim, 2016). Faculty in the global south sit at the nexus of contradictions of internationalization (Brandenburg & de Wit, 2011; Teichler, 2010) as well as the critical and ethical questions the pressures to perform on a global scale produce (Naidoo, 2010; Rizvi & Lingard, 2010 Stein, Andreotti, Bruce, & Susa, 2016).

This scholarly paper contributes the literature on the internationalization of the academy by positing the use of faculty agency as a framework to understand how faculty respond to the multidimensional constraints of globalization and internationalization in the global south. Faculty agency describes how faculty exercise control over, and find meaning in, their professional lives through strategic actions and perspectives that seek to influence and are influenced by the external environment (O’Meara, Terosky, & Neumann, 2008). However, while agency has long been used as a concept to understand development (e.g. Sen, 2000; Alkire, 2005) studies of faculty agency have focused almost exclusively on the constraints of women in high-research institutions in the United States (O’Meara, 2015; O’Meara & Campbell, 2011; Terosky, O’Meara, & Campbell, 2014).

Faculty agency presents a new opportunity to frame studies of faculty in internationalizing institutions in the global south. While research has focused on the role of faculty choice and decision-making in international research collaborations (Finkelstein, Walker, & Chen, 2013), and the self-efficacy and motivation to support internationalization efforts (e.g. Li & Tu, 2016) an agency framework can re-center the power of global south faculty to shape their professional lives. Rather than view faculty as obstacles to internationalization (Leibowitz, Bozalek, Schalkwyk, & Winberg, 2015; Leibowitz, Schalkwyk, Ruiters, Farmer, & Adendorff, 2012) or unwitting accomplices to larger forces of neoliberalism and globalization (Levin & Aliyeva, 2015; Saunders, 2010), faculty agency focuses on how faculty understand and experience their work and the organizational and sociological contexts in which they are embedded.

Reviewing the psychological, sociological and political underpinnings in the concept of agency, in both the development and higher education literature, this paper will explore the theoretical relevance of a faculty agency framework as applied to the internationalization of higher education in the global south. Recent research on internationalization of the academy will be highlighted to emphasize the power of this framework to offer a critical perspective on internationalization. Finally, to further illuminate Education for Sustainability conference theme, this research will offer practical applications of an agency framework in faculty professional development to support sustained organizational change.

Author

• Jennifer Lebron, George Mason University