Learning and Teaching (LATISS)

Welcome to this special themed issue of Learning and Teaching: The International Journal of Higher Education in the Social Sciences in which a set of authors from Ethiopia, China, Indonesia, Finland and South Korea explore the internationalisation of higher education from the periphery and another group from Italy, New Zealand, Australia and the UK analyse market-making in higher education institutions. The articles in this special issue represent some of the collaborative results from an ‘Initial Training Network’ project funded by the EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie programme that analysed ‘Universities in the Knowledge Economy’ (UNIKE) in Europe and the Asia-Pacific Rim.¹

While there is little agreement about the definitions, theories and practices of internationalisation, they have one thing in common. They tend to originate from Europe and North America and primarily serve the interests of Anglo-American academia (Ivancheva and Syndicus 2019; Marginson 2016; Rhoades et al. 2019). These two articles take a different perspective. They look at internationalisation from two kinds of peripheries and consider the strategies that peripheralised countries and people are using to try and create a more balanced or equal relationship between local or national interests and those of universities in Europe and North America. The first article considers internationalisation from peripheral countries in sub-Saharan Africa, China and Indonesia and explores the strategies of regional cooperation, ‘balanced internationalisation’ and marketisation (respectively) that they are adopting to resist marginalisation and dependency. The second article is written from the perspective of international students who are peripheralised within their host university and country in Europe. It explores the dilemmas students encounter when trying to negotiate language politics and the use of social media in order to participate more fully in the university and society.

From the perspective of peripheralised countries, internationalisation is imbalanced and hegemonic, as it is predominantly constructed by universities in the Global North. We explore the imbalanced internationalisation from the cases of sub-Saharan Africa through the dominance of Western knowledge systems and brain drain; China through isolation and playing ‘catch up’; and Indonesia through the financial crisis, the bailout conditions of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank and marketisation. By taking the cases of sub-Sahara Africa, China and Indonesia, this article problematises the idea of internationalisation and argues that it further relegates universities from the peripheralised countries to the margin.

To investigate how the process of peripheralisation usurps internationalisation experiences within the global higher education centres, this article draws on two separate case studies, one conducted in Finland and the other in the UK. In both contexts, Anglophone hegemony plays an important role, but in different manners. In the Finnish case, conflating internationalisation with Englishisation results in both domestic and international students and staff having to continuously grapple with language use in their daily lives. In the UK context, international students in English-speaking universities encounter asymmetric power relations with the locals, which they try to overcome through identity negotiation over digital and physical spaces. Both cases show that creating a liveable international university necessitates structural changes that would build on already existing agentic engagements of international students and staff.

This collection of short essays presents and examines six vignettes of organisational change in British, New Zealand and European universities. Drawing on the social studies of economisation literature, formal research projects and auto-ethnographic insights, the authors detail profound changes in how knowledge is produced in universities. They examine policy documents, calculative techniques and management practices to illustrate how proliferating market rationalities, technologies and relations are reimagining university missions, reframing their practices and refashioning their subjects. Their vignettes demonstrate that market-making pressures are emerging from micro-scale socio-technical arrangements as well as altered funding models and external policy imperatives. They reveal the extent and detail of market-making pressures on academic practice in research and teaching. Finding ways to contest these pressures is imperative.

Budd L. Hall and Rajesh Tandon (2021), Socially Responsible Higher Education: International Perspectives on Knowledge Democracy. Rotterdam, NL: Brill, 303pp., ISBN: 978-90-04-45907-6

Anke Schwittay (2021), Creative Universities: Reimagining Education for Global Challenges and Alternative Futures. Bristol: Bristol University Press, 200pp., ISBN: 978-1529213652

Catherine Bovill (2020) Co-creating Learning and Teaching: Towards Relational Pedagogy in Higher Education. St. Albans: Critical Publishing, 96pp., ISBN: 9781913063818