Learning and Teaching (LATISS)

This special issue is the result of three years of conversations and scholarly exchange, emerging from the Alternative Internationalisms working group of the ‘European Universities – Critical Futures’ project. This project, led by Professor Susan Wright and funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark, allowed for the development of a network of seventeen European research centres, including both senior and early stage researchers, with the stated objective ‘to rethink the role of European universities in a context of political, social and geopolitical upheaval’ (European Universities – Critical Futures n.d.). The internationalisation of higher education is a necessary area for exploration in any rethinking of what European universities can and should be, and so this was one of the foci of the project through a working group of researchers and academics in different parts of the world. ‘Rethinking’ as the overarching aim of the ‘European Universities – Critical Futures’ project allowed not just for an open and curious approach to internationalisation, however, but for stepping back to consider just what ‘the international’ means for those involved in higher education.

Theorisation of higher education internationalisation is biased both as a Western activity and as Euro-/Anglocentric and Anglophone research. In this article, we first argue that it is necessary to ‘think otherwise’ about internationalisation. We then present theorisations of how this could be achieved. As our analysis, we conduct a Mad Libs exercise of two internationalisation documents in which we replace the word ‘international’ and its derivatives with words stemming from the ideological trajectory of the post-Second World War history of internationalisation: ‘peace-seeking’, ‘neoliberal’ and ‘equitable’. The Mad Libs exercise is a playful subversion that helps us break away from the rigidity and structuredness that keep us reproducing biased theorisations.

The concept of ‘centre and periphery’ has become ubiquitous in the study of higher education, especially in an international context. Through an engagement with the recent scholarly literature, we argue that simultaneously this concept has been decontextualised and naturalised. Its origins were largely forgotten and centre and periphery started to be descriptive of ‘the way the world is’. This article argues for the de-naturalisation of this concept, through an exploration of its genealogy, and a critical analysis of the role concepts play in any theoretically grounded engagement with reality. To achieve that, we develop a heuristic of the critical cycle and we show alternative and powerful ways to engage with the concept ‘centre and periphery’. We argue that critique of the concept should lead to alternative projects for higher education.

This article discusses ‘another’ internationalisation of higher education through the lens of the ‘third mission’ of engagement from a Global South viewpoint. It recontextualises internationalisation and the third mission through the meanings and practices of university extension in Latin America. Within a Global North perspective, internationalisation of the third mission is under-studied, compared to the internationalisation of teaching and research. We offer a case study of the Montevideo Group University Association (Spanish acronym: AUGM), an association of Latin American public universities promoting academic exchange in teaching, research and extension. We further our analysis and discussion through a within-case analysis of Uruguay's Udelar, the eponymous founding location of AUGM. At a moment of radical, debilitating global and national marketisation and privatisation focused on the individual, the case of AUGM's internationalisation of regional public extension is complemented by Udelar's case-within-a-case of extension, tying widened higher education access to national democratic reforms.

Krystian Szadkowski (2023), Capital in Higher Education: A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sector London: Palgrave Macmillan, xxv, 271 pp., ISBN: 978-3-031-38443-1

Virna Rossi (2023), Inclusive Learning Design in Higher Education: A Practical Guide to Creating Equitable Learning Experiences New York: Routledge, 344 pp., ISBN: 9781032122298

Rosi Smith (2024), Deepening Participation: The Impact of Cuba's Local University Centres New York: Peter Lang, 244 pp., ISBN: 978-1-6366-7278-6

Gary Saunders (2023), Prefiguring the Idea of the University for a Post-Capitalist Society London: Palgrave Macmillan, xxxii, 256 pp., ISBN: 978-3-031-46648-9

Arun Verma (ed.) (2022), Anti-Racism in Higher Education: An Action Guide for Change Bristol: Policy Press, 230 pp., ISBN: 978-1447364726