Su-ming Khoo

Ethical globalisation or privileged internationalisation? Exploring global citizenship and internationalisation in Irish and Canadian universities

This article explores policies and practices of global citizenship and internationalisation within higher education in Canada and Ireland, comparing two Canadian and two Irish universities. The cases suggest a number of entangled and contradictory strands of internationalisation, with implications for global citizenship. Underlying notions of globalisation, citizenship and ‘development’ are interrogated and issues surrounding the local/global distinction, privilege and marketisation are discussed. International relations paradigms and the ‘development connection’ are examined as broader determinants of understandings of global citizenship.

Algorithmic governance: Developing a research agenda through the power of collective intelligence

We are living in an algorithmic age where mathematics and computer science are coming together in powerful new ways to influence, shape and guide our behaviour and the governance of our societies. As these algorithmic governance structures proliferate, it is vital that we ensure their effectiveness and legitimacy. That is, we need to ensure that they are an effective means for achieving a legitimate policy goal that are also procedurally fair, open and unbiased. But how can we ensure that algorithmic governance structures are both? This article shares the results of a collective intelligence workshop that addressed exactly this question. The workshop brought together a multidisciplinary group of scholars to consider (a) barriers to legitimate and effective algorithmic governance and (b) the research methods needed to address the nature and impact of specific barriers. An interactive management workshop technique was used to harness the collective intelligence of this multidisciplinary group. This method enabled participants to produce a framework and research agenda for those who are concerned about algorithmic governance. We outline this research agenda below, providing a detailed map of key research themes, questions and methods that our workshop felt ought to be pursued. This builds upon existing work on research agendas for critical algorithm studies in a unique way through the method of collective intelligence.

Movements, mobilities and the politics of hazardous waste

Global flows of hazardous waste and waste management technologies are major sources of environmental contestation. They reflect political structures and struggles within, and between, developed and less developed countries. The ‘new mobilities paradigm’ is tested using two cases of protest in Malaysia and East Germany. Focusing on the conjunctures of various (im)mobilities, the ways in which political circumstances combine with the materialities of wastes and technologies are shown to affect the trajectories and outcomes of environmental protest. This challenges assumptions that mobilities of objects, people and ideas inevitably undermine governmentality. While the merits of ‘mobilities’ as a lens for inquiry are acknowledged, greater attention should be paid to the politics of (im)mobilisations.

Ethical Internationalization, Neo-liberal Restructuring and “Beating the Bounds” of Higher Education

This chapter presents a picture of the implications of neo-liberal re-structuring, framed as “academic capitalism”, to the erosion of the public role of the university and to understandings and practices of higher education. Drawing from experiences in Canada and Ireland, we offer insights from an international collaborative project on ethics and internationalization in higher education, invoking its underlying principles of intelligibility, dissent and solidarity. Reflecting on aspects of education and resistance, and emphasizing the dilemmas of power and complicity, we examine different possibilities for hopeful and ethical academic praxis in times of austerity and glocal crises.

Health justice and capabilities: A turning point for global health?

This essay discusses two important recent books on health justice and makes the case for their relevance to global health and to social and political mobilization for health reform. Health and Social Justice (Ruger, 2010) and Health Justice (Venkatapuram, 2011) approach theories of capabilities and justice as the substantive ground of human health. They substantiate and more fully specify the capabilities paradigm, its shared basis with health rights and its relevance to health reforms and the growing global health justice movement. The recent turning point for global health invites a meeting point with the capabilities paradigm. The capabilities approach offers conceptual and practical potential for ‘global health’, linking normative, substantive and procedural claims for health justice and health rights.

Envisioning the Malaysian Nation: Ethnic Nationalism or Corporate Capitalism?

There seems to be little consensus to date on how globalization has affected nationalism. Nations, states and ideologies of nation and nation-state all seem to have been affected differently, and the outcome of the discussion is, so far, inconclusive. Globalization has not led to the dissolving of nationalism, and the dissolution of old national states has led to an upsurge of ethnic nationalisms of an unprecedented ferocity and virulence. Staunch chroniclers of the left like Eric Hobsbawm, who had invested hopes in the progressive capabilities of the modern national state, have expressed despair and incomprehension as the national states of the twentieth century have failed to fulfil their universalist modernist promise. In its wake, narrow nationalisms have re-emerged, demonstrating that backward- looking and narrow forms of identity have proved surprisingly durable, having persisted unharmed by capitalism and modernity. Ideologues of the right have claimed the victory as theirs, capitalizing on the demise of socialist states as vindication for the untrammelled adoption of far-right free-market ideologies as the blueprint for social action.

Sustainable knowledge transformation in and through higher education: a case for transdisciplinary leadership

This article explores interand transdisciplinarity, given the need for more complex, relevant, and transformative knowledge to shift society towards more sustainable futures. It connects practical questions about economic, societal, and ecological limits to questions about the limitations of academic knowledge. Transdisciplinarity involves co-constructing socially relevant, transformative knowledge with actors outside academia. In practice, transdisciplinary work requires clarity about intentions, along with inclusive and well-facilitated collaborative processes that accommodate dissenting and transgressive perspectives. Higher education has begun to experiment with interand transdisciplinarity via sustainability-focused projects. However, it insufficiently addresses broader demands for transformation and cannot address these adequately without integral leadership.

Public Scholarship and Alternative Economies: Revisiting Democracy and Justice in Higher Education Imaginaries

This chapter critically interrogates the understanding of economics guiding higher education globally.

Between Engagement and Citizenship

This book was motivated by a desire to contribute to in-depth, critical discussions about engaged scholarship and education. Recognizing that, although some theorizing is underway, much of the published literature on community-engaged scholarship focuses on practice-based stories and pragmatic concerns relating to encouraging, supporting, rewarding and institutionalizing engagement in a variety of educational settings, we sought to shift the discourse and create space for a more broad discussion.