Terri Kim

Transnational academic mobility, internationalization and interculturality in higher education

The purpose of this paper is to consider the complex relations of transnational academic mobility, internationalization and interculturality in higher education. It is argued that, in the contemporaneous relations of the triad, ‘interculturality’ disappears and the other two – transnational academic mobility and internationalization – are both enclosed by the market. The contemporary condition and pattern of transnational academic mobility are also shaped by neoliberal policy and market‐framed research competition. This paper offers some critical reflections on the new world of mobilities and interculturalities and the ‘new strangers’ in the university.

Transnational academic mobility, knowledge, and identity capital

This article begins with the contemporary context of transnational academic mobility, and sketches a typology of mobile academics according to their self-identification. UK examples are offered as the main case study here. The article will then explore the relations of mobile academics and their embodied and encultured knowledge. It employs a concept of ‘transnational identity capital’ to discuss the position of transnational mobile academic intellectuals as a ‘stranger’ as inspired by Simmels sociology of space.

Shifting patterns of transnational academic mobility: a comparative and historical approach

This article is an initial attempt to illustrate how patterns of academic mobility in the history of universities have been framed by the international politics of particular time periods. The article briefly looks at ‘the medieval period’ and then at the emergent colonial and nationalist periods, including the ways that institutions as well as academics themselves were mobile. More contemporaneously the powerful political forces of both the interwar period and the Cold War period (which are well known) are sketched. The final part of the article shows in some detail how, in the contemporary period, the scale and speed of cross‐border academic mobility has changed. There are new actors and new ideologies. What is clear from the article is that there is not merely a need to keep information about the flows of academics up to date for policy purposes. It is also clear that we are a long way from being able to theorise the problem, sociologically and comparatively.

Internationalisation of Higher Education in South Korea: Reality, Rhetoric, and Disparity in Academic Culture and Identities.

The central theme of this paper is contradictions: the ways in which official agendas of internationalisation in higher education are disturbed by the principles of inclusion and exclusion in the local context of university academic culture. The case of South Korea shows how the national policies for the inter-nationalisation of higher education are translated into local cultural practice inside academe: What are the ‘positions’ of foreign and female academics in the specific national university context? How are they constructed by official policies of inter-nationalisation? How are they experienced by individuals to form new reflexive identities? The paper offers an illustrative analysis of the positioned and positional identities of foreign and female academics and the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion drawn around their identities. This exploratory study is aimed at future research agendas for a larger theoretical study on internationally mobile academics in different social contexts.

CONFUCIANISM, MODERNITIES AND KNOWLEDGE: CHINA, SOUTH KOREA AND JAPAN

This chapter offers a critique of the Confucian legacies in East Asian modernities, knowledge and pedagogies. Specifi c examples are drawn from China, Korea and Japan for comparative analysis. The three countries in East Asia have all experienced the historical repetitions of discarding and then reviving the Confucian legacy at different times of modernisation. However, they all have kept the strong Confucian pedagogic culture, which frames the ways in which knowledge is transmitted and applied to defi ne modernities in East Asia. Confucianism has a huge continuity ‐ although it has been travelling widely and rewritten over time. There have been various East Asian historiographies, writing and rewriting the Confucian legacy in East Asian modernisation since the late nineteenth century. Scholars attributed the lack of development in East Asia to that tradition initially, before more recently attributing the success of these countries to the same tradition (Bellah, 1957, 1968; Eisenstadt, 1968; Morishima, 1982; Weede, 1996; Bell & Hahm, 2003). In other words, Confucianism has been used to account for both the failure and success of modernisations in East Asia over time. Confucianism used to be condemned as a major cause for the economic stagnation of East Asian countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and then started to be praised as a major constituent in the belated but rapid economic take-off and sustained industrialisation process in Japan fi rst, whose path was followed by South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and now China (Berger, 1986, 1988; Tu, 1984, 1996; Tai, 1996). Overall, Confucianism has been a frame of reference to explain East Asia as if the legacy of Confucianism is the key to understand the commonality of the East Asian enigma of late development and fast modernisation. The Confucian paternalistic modalities of family and social relations (Bell & Hahm, 2003), and the public signifi cance of educational credentials in training and selecting the governing elite, Mandarin cadre (Zeng, 1999; Wilkinson, 1964, 1969) have been acknowledged as a chronic attribute to both the retardation and remarkable success in economic development in East Asia (Woo-Cumings, 1999). Although interpretations of Confucianism have been written at different times in both positive and negative ways, it is argued that what has not changed is the acknowledgement of Confucian “pedagogic” attributes to East Asian education and societies. The pedagogic

The intellect, mobility and epistemic positioning in doing comparisons and comparative education

This article offers a reflexive analysis and discussion of the relationship between academic mobility and comparative knowledge creation. It argues that what constitutes ‘comparative knowledge’ is not solely Wissenschaften but more often entwined with Weltanschauungen, derived from lived experiences – as exemplified in the biographic narratives of some of the major intellects. It reviews the notions of the ‘gaze’ and the concepts of the Other and Homeworld/Alienworld as epistemic positioning in doing comparative education. In the framework of phenomenological thinking, the paper discusses the intimate relationship between comparative knowledge and positional knowledge.

Old borrowings and new models of the university in East Asia

This paper illustrates the transfer of university models from Europe and America to East Asia and will consider how international power relations in different times transform ideas about the university, in the process of global transfer. These relations will be identified with different forms of the state: imperial, colonial, welfare and market state.

Higher Education Reforms in South Korea: Public—Private Problems in Internationalising and Incorporating Universities

This article analyses the policy and practices of restructuring higher education in South Korea in light of the distinctive characteristics of Korean higher education development and government–higher education relations. The role of government in the development of higher education in Korea has been typically as a direct regulator rather than a coordinator. However, the global trend towards neo-liberal policies, such as privatization and a ‘lean’ state which coordinates market competition, began to be influential in Korea during the 1990s, which eventually led to a shift in higher education policies. There is a public rhetoric about neo-liberal public sector reforms and restructuring; and policy implementations are being made accordingly. The article critically reviews the current governments political rationale for restructuring higher education against the backdrop of ‘globalization’. It is suggested that despite such influences, the Ministry of Education (MOE) has not yet shifted its role in regulating the higher education sector: the fundamental relations of the MOE and the higher education sector have not changed. This article discusses why and how the relations of government to higher education are, in fact, unchanging in Korea.

Internationalisation and development in East Asian higher education: an introduction

It is important to recognise that comparison is not a method or even an academic technique; rather, it is a discursive strategy… Good comparisons often come from the experience of strangeness and absences. (Benedict Anderson, 2016)

Internationalisation of higher education and global mobility

able good’ (23), leading to increasing inequities and declining social cohesion among students from different socioeconomic groups. In Malta, too, Michael Buhagiar and Deborah Chetcuti demonstrate that private tutoring enables economically better-off families to ‘invisibly’ purchase educational privilege for their children (142). In these contexts, private tutoring appears to displace the school as the main site of socioeconomic reproduction, creating new hegemonic mechanisms for marginalisation and exclusion. At the same time, the book reveals that private tutoring can also function as a counter-hegemonic space in education. Drawing on historical research, Giovanna Campani’s chapter on Italy tells how private tutoring may operate as a space of counter-hegemonic action in a totalitarian state. In fascist Italy (1922–1943), for example, private tutoring was the only means of survival for many anti-fascist teachers and intellectuals, enabling them to pursue education alternative to the one promoted by the fascist propaganda. Although similar resistance was also present in socialist countries during the Cold War and has become increasingly visible in the context of neoliberal reforms today, the book does not engage with this important topic beyond Campani’s chapter. This is an unfortunate omission. The closest we get to a loosely similar discussion is in the less dramatic form of Oller and Glasman’s chapter on France and Hartman’s chapter on Egypt, which suggest that private tutoring may open alternative opportunities for socialising for individuals and groups that may be unable to do it in public settings. Perhaps one of the main achievements of the editors is their ability to situate the phenomenon of private tutoring within the larger discussions in comparative education, including the debates over national identities, citizenship, (re)distributive role of the state, privatisation and public education, as well as the issues of social justice and equity. Collectively, the authors not only offer a critical reading of the private tutoring phenomenon but they also invite the readers to ponder over such broader questions as the meaning(s) of education in a society or what it means to be an ‘educated person’ in today’s consumer-driven society. While not all authors engage with these questions directly and consistently, the book nevertheless presents an important step in our understanding of the multidimensional nature of the private tutoring phenomenon and its implications for public education systems in the Mediterranean and beyond.