Sharon Stein

Social cartographies as performative devices in research on higher education

ABSTRACT In this article, we review social cartography as a methodological approach to map and collectively engage diverse perspectives within the study of higher education. We illustrate the uses of this approach by drawing on our own experiences engaging it as part of an international research project about the effects of the convergence of globalization and economic crises in higher education. We offer several examples of how social cartography can enable agonistic collaboration amongst existing positions, as well as open up new spaces and possibilities for alternative futures in higher education.

‘Beyond 2015’, within the modern/colonial global imaginary? Global development and higher education

ABSTRACT Efforts to emphasize higher education’s role in development have grown in recent years, but important questions remain about the motivations and effects of these initiatives. In this paper, we employ the concept of a ‘modern/colonial global imaginary’ to consider the impact of the enduring power relations and uneven politics of knowledge in the relationship between higher education and development. Specifically, we consider the Association of Commonwealth Universities’ (ACU) ‘Beyond 2015’ campaign, which was launched in anticipation of the new UN Sustainable Development Goals. We argue that despite the ACU’s intention to provide ‘a platform for diverse voices, particularly from the global South’, the campaign was structured in a way that discouraged dissenting perspectives. More broadly, we consider available possibilities and limitations for challenging mainstream development agendas.

The Persistent Challenges of Addressing Epistemic Dominance in Higher Education: Considering the Case of Curriculum Internationalization

The recent growth of internationalization at colleges and universities in the Global North has amplified the need to address the ongoing colonial politics of knowledge in these institutions. In this article I argue that a failure to denaturalize and interrupt long-standing patterns of curricular Euro-supremacy may result in internationalization becoming yet another means of economic expansion and epistemic erasure. However, rather than offer a prescriptive roadmap for epistemic decolonization, this article is an effort to consider the paradoxes, challenges, and difficulties that often arise in efforts to do this work.

Mapping Global Citizenship

Abstract The demand to cultivate global citizenship is frequently invoked as central to colleges’ and universities’ internationalization efforts. However, the term global citizenship remains undertheorized in the context of U.S. higher education. This article maps and engages three common global citizenship positions—entrepreneurial, liberal humanist, and anti-oppressive—and articulates an additional fourth possible position, based in encounters and engagements with incommensurability. Tracing the recurring patterns in each of these positions can allow for more complex and nuanced conversations and engagements to emerge among practitioners and students about global citizenship.

The Educational Challenge of Unraveling the Fantasies of Ontological Security

ABSTRACT In this article we address the current context of intensified racialized state securitization by tracing its roots to the naturalized colonial architectures of everyday modern life—which we present through the metaphor of “the house modernity built.” While contemporary crises are often perceived to derive from external threats to the house, we argue that in fact these crises are a product of the violent and unsustainable practices that are required in order to build and sustain the house itself. As the structural integrity of the house increasingly comes under strain, there are different possible responses, three of which we review here. We conclude by asking what kind of education might enable us to imagine and practice alternative formations of existence in a context where the house appears to be crumbling, and, indeed, has always been a fantasy.

Afterword: Provisional Pedagogies toward Imagining Global Mobilities Otherwise.

ABSTRACT In this afterword we bring insights from the special issue into conversation with the ongoing educational challenges of imagining the world differently. To do so, we consider how global mobilities are conceptualized and materialized within three “pillars” of the architecture of modern existence: the nation-state, global capital, and Eurocentric humanism. We consider how each of these pillars stands dependent upon racial and colonial expropriation, exploitation, and subjugation, and in response we propose a provisional pedagogy that would: interrupt and make visible the role of violence in producing contemporary existence (including global mobilities); ask how we might enact transformative modes of redress for the harms produced by this architecture; and facilitate the imagining of and experimentation with alternative possibilities of existence.

Higher Education and the Modern/Colonial Global Imaginary

In this article, we complicate common critical narratives about the neoliberalization of higher education by situating more recent trends within the genealogy of a modern/colonial global imaginary. By linking current patterns of “accumulation by dispossession” with histories and enduring architectures of racialized expropriation and exploitation, we consider both the strategic possibilities and inherent limitations of enacting resistance from within this imaginary. In particular, we engage the imperative to contest new configurations of dispossession while grappling with the ways that violent social relations have always subsidized public higher education. We suggest that facing such paradoxes may be instructive and open up new possibilities, and at the same time, this requires examination of existing investments and attachments.

Universities, slavery, and the unthought of anti-Blackness

Over the past 10 years there has been an increase in institutional recognition of how US universities and their founders directly participated in and benefitted from Black chattel slavery. However, these developments have largely escaped the attention of scholars who take higher education as their object of study. This article offers a conceptual reading of how apology efforts around slavery have unfolded at a single university. Drawing on the intersections of Black Studies and decolonial scholarship, I consider how revised institutional narratives develop through efforts to address and incorporate these violent histories.

Internationalization for an Uncertain Future: Tensions, Paradoxes, and Possibilities.

Abstract:As higher education is increasingly called upon to play a central role in addressing the challenges and crises of todays complex, uncertain, and volatile world, internationalization efforts are intensifying. Emphasizing higher education as a space for critically-informed, socially accountable, and open-ended conversations about alternative futures, in this paper I reframe common approaches to complexity, uncertainty, and critique by offering a social cartography of three critical approaches to internationalization: soft, radical, and liminal. Mapping and historicizing diverse perspectives can complicate existing analyses, interrupt the prescriptive tendencies of critique, and illuminate new possible horizons of thought and action in higher education.

The relationality of race in education research

This edited collection examines the ways in which the local and global are key to understanding race and racism in the intersectional context of contemporary education. Analysing a broad range of examples, it highlights how race and racism is a relational phenomenon, that interconnects local, national and global contexts and ideas. The current educational climate is subject to global influences and the effects of conservative, hyper-nationalist politics and neoliberal economic rationalising in local settings that are creating new formations of race and racism. While focused predominantly on Australia and southern world or settler colonial contexts, the book aims to constructively contribute to broader emerging research and debates about race and education. Through the adoption of a relational framing, it draws the Australian context into the global conversation about race and racism in education in ways that challenge and test current understandings of the operation of race and racism in contemporary social and educational spaces. Importantly, it also pushes debates about race and racism in education and research to the foreground in Australia where such debates are typically dismissed or cursorily engaged. The book will guide readers as they navigate issues of race in education research and practice, and its chapters will serve as provocations designed to assist in critically understanding this challenging field. It reaches beyond education scholarship, as concerns to do with race remain intertwined with wider social justice issues such as access to housing, health, social/economic mobility, and political representation.