Internationalisation in Higher Education beyond the Western Horizon: Critical Perspectives

Over the past decade, a strand of scholarship, Critical Internationalization Studies (CIS), has emerged which analyses the nature, purposes, and impact of global higher education and internationalisation, providing a corrective to normative, acritical scholarship. Within this body of work, they focus on an influential strand, ‘internationalization otherwise’ (CIS/IO), which shares a communicative purpose: portraying global higher education as a continuation of Western colonialism and hegemony. 

This speaker provides a critical perspective on existing academic literature on the internationalisation of higher education in China. The central argument is that much of this work undermines its own aims to contribute to the ‘de-centring’ of the West and to redress epistemic injustice. This is because it tends to engage in ‘re-orientalism’ and ‘Sino-speak’, relying on an essentialist binary of East and West.

In recent years, the Chinese historical concept of tianxia has been increasingly invoked in discussions of global higher education. Often presented as a critique of the Euro-American dominated world order, tianxia is portrayed as an alternative, or even superior, worldview that “contains unique merits in discussing global higher education phenomena.” This speaker, however, argues that such interpretations tend to overlook the imperialist implications of the concept.

This speaker analyses the balance between political, administrative and market logics in recruiting international students at Russian universities across different historical periods, from the mid-1950s to the present day. This periodisation is based on critical shifts in state regulations in higher education embedded in changing political and economic contexts. 

There is an extensive literature on student mobility that seeks to understand the nature of, rationales for and consequences of internationalisation in higher education. This scholarship primarily focusses on students studying in the ‘west’. This speaker shows how ‘atypical’ student destinations also illuminate the contradictions of internationalisation, revealing the challenges faced by higher education settings beyond academic centres in the west.