Placing knowledge: mobility in internationalised higher education

Abstract

Internationalisation of higher education is premised by a seeming paradox: On the one hand, academic knowledge strives to be universal in the sense that it claims to produce generalizable, valid and reliable knowledge that can be used, critiqued, and redeveloped by academics from all over the world; on the other hand, the rationale for strengthening mobility through internationalisation is based on an imagination of the potentials of particular locations (academic institutions). Intrigued by this tension between universality and particularity in academic knowledge production, this paper presents preliminary findings from a project that study internationalisation of higher education as an agent in the interrelated processes of place-making and knowledge-making. The project is based on three case-studies. In this paper, focus is on PhD students’ change of research environment. This is used as a case for studying what comes to count as e.g. relevant, good, true knowledge, to whom, where and why. Background This paper presents preliminary findings from a project concerning the role of mobility in internationalisation of higher education. The project is based on three case-studies one of which is presented here – namely PhD-students’ change of research environment. Since the 1990s, the political and institutional concern with internationalisation of higher education has been accompanied by a substantial growth in research on internationalisation which is dominated by pragmatic publications targeting practitioners and policy-makers in higher education (Teichler, 2005, Kehm 2011). In general, scholarly debates have focused on the role of neo-liberalism as a structuring force in contemporary international education and,