This article examines how a sample of 62 higher education institutions in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom discuss international students in their official institutionalization strategies, focusing on how ideas of race and diversity are addressed. We find that institutional strategies connect international students to an abstract notion of diversity, using visual images to portray campus environments as inclusive of racial, ethnic and religious diversity. Yet, strategy documents rarely discuss race, racialization, or racism explicitly, despite the fact that most international students in all three countries are non-white. Moreover, racial injustice is externalized as a global issue and racial diversity is instrumentalized as a source of improving institutional reputation or diversity metrics. We argue that a first step to creating more inclusive and anti-racist campuses is to acknowledge international students’ racial identities and experiences with racism in official discourses and strategies.

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This paper explores how international partnerships are conceptualized between core Anglophone, European and African universities. Internationalization strategies are examined from a decolonial lens to situate the findings within a global context that is entangled in the consequences of colonialism and ongoing coloniality that continue to perpetuate global inequities, including devaluing of indigenous and local knowledge. Findings suggest that institutions in the Global North still view Africa, and the Global South in general, from a deficit lens and in need of aid, knowledge and direction. Strategies from the Global North use terms like mentoring, development and poverty reduction when describing their partnerships in the Global South. In contrast, institutions from Africa highlight their desire to be knowledge producers and contribute to research excellence on a global level. Furthermore, institutions in all regions frame strategic international partnerships as those that will boost their reputation or image as they engage in a race for status and global rankings; however, strategies do not describe how they will approach such partnerships in a very uneven global playing field between the Global North and Global South. Finally, the Global South continues to be viewed as a source of international students and as such, partnerships pursued in Africa and the Global South by core-Anglo and European institutions focus on recruitment of students as one of the rationales or benefits of partnerships. Given these findings, international strategies for Global North-South partnerships continue to reproduce colonial hierarchies of privilege, preventing more equitable approaches to partnerships.

This article explores how incorporating spiritual dimensions into co-curricular offerings in higher education can create spaces in which students can deeply explore ways of knowing the world and interrogate one’s own beliefs. This approach can facilitate a more comprehensive approach to internationalizing or globalizing our campus and the student experience.

In this article, we share our thoughts on how we arrived at decolonization in our research in internationalization of higher education. We offer our stories to explore the epistemological tensions we navigate in our work given the various liminal spaces we occupy in Western universities. We conclude this article by reflecting together on our narratives and posing five critical questions that we hope will invite our readers to reflect deeper alongside us about epistemic justice, decolonization and internationalization of higher education.