Beyond Assimilation: Rethinking Internationalization in Higher Education through Epistemic Justice and Depth Education

• In Event: Human Rights and Decolonial Perspectives

Proposal

As a former international student from Pakistan at American and Canadian universities, I experienced both the privilege of access to global educational opportunities and the limitations of being persistently misrecognized. My English proficiency was deemed “too good” for someone from Pakistan; my ambition as a Muslim woman was read through Western tropes of emancipation, my visa status framed me as a temporary 'outsider'. These calculated judgments underscored a wider problem: internationalization in higher education (IHE) promises connection and cooperation but too often reproduces colonial hierarchies of knowledge and belonging (Stein et al, 2016; Shahjahan & Edwards, 2021). Where my learning flourished was not in moments of adjustment or assimilation but in spaces where I was seen for who I was beyond the narrow bounds of nationality, race, or visa status, and valued for the epistemic contributions I brought with me. Analyzing theoretical frameworks in lived experience, this paper argues that internationalization has been neoliberally and neocolonially co-opted, sustaining a form of mental colonization where the Global North is upheld as the normative ideal. Instead of fostering true understanding, collaboration, or collegiality, internationalization entrenches epistemic violence by requiring Global South students to aspire to Euro-American subjectivities while dismissing their own. Current peace education discourses, framed through this paradigm, remain superficial and insufficient.

Methodologically, international student research often emphasizes adjustment, mobility, and outcomes without addressing these deeper epistemic injustices. To fill this gap, I bring together critical diagnostic tools from decolonial scholarship, particularly Vanessa Andreotti’s HEADSUP framework and her concept of depth education (2016, 2021). HEADSUP reveals the blind spots of dominant approaches that deny complicity, offer easy answers, and sustain progress myths. Depth education, by contrast, offers a pedagogy of complexity, paradox, and discomfort, conditions necessary for relational peace and a genuine engagement between students and higher education. This paper critiques internationalization from a postcolonial theory perspective, tracing its colonial roots and engaging with literature that highlights problematic North–South dynamics in higher education (Subedi & Daza, 2008; Beck, 2021). Examples include the framing of “cultural adjustment” as a one-way imperative, which reduces peace to assimilation, the saviourist narrative that compels Global South students to “give back” as proof of legitimacy and the marketized use of diversity as branding, which obscures rather than dismantles structural inequalities. Together, these dynamics show how present higher education becomes ornamental when it refuses to interrogate colonial inheritances.

The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it identifies how neoliberal and neocolonial co-optation of internationalization obstructs higher education’s potential to be a tool for global justice and peace. Second, it proposes epistemic justice and relationality as the foundation of a renewed decolonial internationalization paradigm. By drawing on stories and experiences of international students paired with the theoretical framework of depth education, I suggest pathways for creating educational environments where belonging, plurality, and reciprocal learning are prioritized over assimilation and market imperatives.

Re-examining internationalization through this lens offers a way to move beyond intellectualizing global divides to charting possibilities for genuine cooperation. Only by addressing epistemic injustice can international higher education fulfill its promise as a site for building peace in a divided world.

Author

• Maham Kamal Ahsan, University of British Columbia, Dept of Educational Studies