Governmentality and global citizenship in higher education exports

• In Event: Neoliberalism and Globalization

Proposal

This paper theorizes international education through a Foucauldian lens of global governmentality. Globalization, world culture theory, and global citizenship are examined to address the far-reaching consequences for educational actors. Higher education as an export is considered as an example of these consequences that delimit sustainable education because it presupposes that educational practices from economically developed countries are superior to those of the global south. Comparison creates an unequal dynamic wherein education in the global south is characterized as deficient and perennially in a state of catching up to educational practices in economically developed contexts. In this sense, progress is situated within the confines of knowledge and expertise in developed geographies, yet it does not consider how networks of power and privilege create and circumscribe international education.
Foucault’s (1994) governmentality depicts how the state’s control of citizens has expanded from ruling through laws to also include regulation via more subtle mechanisms and broad categories of human life. Citizens adopt these modes of control and begin to govern themselves. Globalization and world culture theory present an arena to explore the implications of global governmentality (Larner & Walters, 2004) on educational problems, specifically on higher education as an export.
Foucault’s (2008) description of American neoliberalism that applies market rationalities to non-economic areas and which he also describes as a facet of governmentality that requires a “‘critique’ far more radical than a test of optimization” (p. 203) exemplifies the impact of higher education as export. Universities as export mediate matters of governmentality within two (or more) countries. Exporting higher education entails mechanisms and replication of power that, from a neoliberal stance, increase the reach of education and increase its profits. However, exporting higher education and the ways it carries state power must be examined closely to address concerns related to its effects.
Higher Education as Export
Educational institutions are sites of state regulation and control. Students learn to regulate themselves in content knowledge and knowledge of behavior and thinking. These ideas are embedded in policies and practices that align with and support governmental agendas. Universities also fall under the umbrella of state regulation, and they condition their actors to conform to expectations, policies, and practices that reinforce the state’s power. These internalized regulations hold significance beyond national power when considered within globalization and transnational educational export. International and local laws have primacy in regulating university campuses operating in foreign countries. However, a university’s home countries’ laws – and by extension, mechanisms of control in governmentality – preserve a significant role in regulating operations in foreign countries.
Scholarly Mobility and States’ Powers
Transnational universities retain some decision-making power in determining curriculum, scholarly selection, and normative values yet these choices and how people navigate them are moderated by both local and foreign contexts. People in universities are controlled through the concept of “micro-physics” (Foucault, 1995, p. 26) or the effects of power within these institutions. The execution of this control relates to Foucault’s (1995) conception of the “body politic” (p. 28) that imbues people with power and knowledge that serves to subjugate; applying this idea in the case of universities as export implies that transnational education also contains elements of subjugation.
Universities operating in foreign countries are sites of control by both the home and foreign state. People in these spaces encounter and negotiate the states’ strategies of domination in multiple frameworks: the university’s home government, the local government, and the ways in which the university mediates the power structures between the two. More layers are possible if the scholars in question have bi- or multi-cultural backgrounds.
Scholarly mobility can be physical with universities operating campuses in multiple countries or digital by offering online courses open to people anywhere in the world. Whether physical or digital, scholarly mobility implies issues of control beyond the national level as people travel and carry with them ideas that regulate their own behavior and beliefs and which seek to impose the same on others.
Foucault (1995) asserts that bodies are implicated in a political field, but that the body “becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body” (p. 26). Scholars in transnational universities experience the micro-physics of control and subjection from multiple powers. Scholars who encounter conceptions of power in conflict with their previous socialization, may be afforded an opportunity to reflect and interrogate the ways they have internalized power structures that seek to regulate and police them from their previous context.
Global Citizenship
From the perspective of educationalists, international education is an opportunity for learners to expand their horizons. International education and study abroad opportunities are often characterized as essential for the modern learner. Themes of intercultural competence and professional development are central to marketing tools to entice students to engage. These positions often prioritize building intercultural competence, yet the concept is often ill-defined or couched within the guise of building cultural awareness that is more realistically understood as business acumen to advance capitalist agendas in the global arena. This rhetoric is mirrored by government discourses on international education opportunities. However, how people enact global citizenship is far more diverse than mere economic motivations (Koyama, 2015) and often entails a confluence of factors best viewed as meta-organizations (Brankovic, 2018). Access to and utility of notions of global citizenship are unequal and central to theorizing educational internationalization.
Implications
Higher education as an export demonstrates the relative distribution and tension of power between states and among scholars who are internationally mobile. Transnational universities occupy a liminal space between home and foreign states and their agendas. How scholars within them mediate those tensions as they encounter other ways of being can provide a space for critical reflection, interrogation, and potential resistance to state power structures. Enactment of power from a foreign and a home government on transnational universities and its actors suggests a space for potential tension and greater awareness of internalized modes regulation. Global citizenship also reveals a neoliberal agenda that serves to reinforce and replicate unequal power structures within international education.

Author

• Cathryn Bennett, University of North Carolina, Greensboro