Going Beyond the Local: Exploring the Role of Transnational Higher Education in Shaping Students’ Life Trajectories in Uzbekistan

Abstract

To enhance access and improve the quality of Higher Education in Uzbekistan, seven international campuses have been established since 1998, with two additional ones during 2018. These are part of a more recent trend in the internationalization of higher education: Transnational Higher Education (TNE). Though the growing literature on TNE has investigated an array of issues, very few studies have focused on students’ perception and experience, its socio-cultural value and impact and its long-term implications for employment and individual life courses. To address this gap, the following study explores the way in which TNE influences Uzbek students’ life courses by shaping their individual life projects. In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 21 final year students from four different degree courses taken at a British institute. Findings reveal that most students’ life projects were internationally oriented and set in contraposition to their perception of local-traditional parameters for life projects. This juxtaposition was accompanied by respondents’ representation of themselves as those suitable for international spheres of action compared to ‘others’ that fit local/traditional ones. However, many of their plans were perceived to be threatened by the same local traditions which they sought to overcome. These findings can be interpreted as tensions resulting from modernizing forces which shift the locus of life projects away from the local-traditional to the global-modern and by the way life projects are coloured by respondents’ positioning (in Bourdieu’s sense) shaping their representations of self and others.