Equity and Reflexivity in Higher Education Networks, Partnerships, and Research: An Interactive Dialogue

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Session Purpose and Objectives

The ability for higher education institutions within different world areas to work in an equal and collaborative context is often clouded by challenges and asymmetric approaches to engagement. For example, it is common for international higher education activities and partnership agreements to invoke the phrase “mutual benefit.” Yet, if left vague and undefined, the term does little to address among stakeholders the differing understandings and expectations of benefit, unequal material resources and power dynamics, and the positioning of whose knowledge and skills are deemed valuable both within and outside of the collaboration (George Mwangi, 2017; LaFleur, 2021; Sutton, 2010). Thus, without intentional centering of equity in partnership development and engagement, cross-border higher education efforts can come to reify the inequity that they are often seeking to mitigate. The theme of this year’s conference, “Illuminate the Power of Idealism,” offers an opportunity to imagine new ways and modalities of incorporating equity, reflexivity, and participation in higher education activities.


Significance of the Session

This interactive panel presentation contributes to ongoing conversations about inequity in international partnerships and shares insights from global networks and partnerships that can be harnessed to decolonize global collaborations and give rise to more participatory and multidirectional engagement. The panel presentations bring together academics, practitioners, and international donors to understand how power, privilege and inequities can play a part in a variety of international collaborations. The session specifically incorporates an open and participatory conversation with attendees to uncover ways of using a decolonial lens when establishing or maintaining cross-border collaborations. This panel brought together by USAID's Leading through Learning Global Platform (Leading through Learning), which is a USAID global learning system made up of the Higher Education Learning Network (HELN), Education in Crisis and Conflict Network (ECCN), and the Global Reading Network (GRN).


Session Format

To encourage participation and active engagement, presentations will be balanced with ample opportunity for discussion among the attendees. The Chair will begin with a short introduction about the landscape of the asymmetries and inequities cross-border collaborations. Then each paper presentation will offer examples from research and practice that illuminate the challenges and opportunities for equity across different international collaborations. Following presentations, the discussant will highlight themes across the papers that explore the economic, cultural, and political systems that create barriers for authentic and reflexive cross-border activities. The discussant will then facilitate dialogue among panelists and attendees to and explore methods of countering northern and western dominance in cross-border higher education partnerships using research presented as a beginning point. Through participatory activities, attendees will have the opportunity to contribute to an imagining of an ethic of global and cross-border higher education engagement that can be operationalized within academic publishing, donor funding, and other systems and processes.

Sub Unit

• Higher Education SIG

Chair

• Jennifer Lebron, George Mason University

Individual Presentations

• The USAID Higher Education Learning Network as Participatory Power Sharing - Jennifer Lebron, George Mason University

• Mutuality in Practice: From Rhetoric to Reality in International Academic Partnerships - Chrystal A. George Mwangi, George Mason University

• Building Research Management Capacity to Reduce Barriers to Access - Rebecca Ward, IREX; Moses Chimbari, University of Kwazulu-Natal

Discussant

• Pilar Mendoza, University of Missouri, Columbia