International study in the global south: linking institutional, staff, student and knowledge mobilities

Abstract

The international mobility of institutions, staff, students and knowledge resources such as books and study materials have usually been studied separately. This paper, for the first time, brings these different forms of knowledge mobilities together. Through a historical analysis of South African HE alongside results from a quantitative survey of academic staff in three international branch campuses in South Africa, the paper suggests three things. First, it points to the importance of regional education hubs in the global South and their role in South-South staff and student mobilities. Second, it points to the importance of reading these mobilities as outcomes of historically attuned policy making-educational, migratory and political. Finally, the paper points to the theoretical possibilities that arise by bringing institutional, staff, student and knowledge resource mobilities in place and suggests new avenues for further research.

Higher education as a factor of socio-economic performance and development

“…Evidently, this system bears all the essential features of a best practices and benchmarking philosophy, which as Zairi (2010) observed, involves identifying key performance indicators or metrics for assessing performance. In this case particularly, the metrics or the parameters used in the ranking are derived from the core mission of institutions of higher learning, including teaching, research, knowledge transfer, and international outlook (Gunter and Raghuram, 2018;Radwan, 2018).…”

Infrastructures of immobility: enabling international distance education students in Africa tonotmove

“…South Africa is one of the most important destinations for students from the African continent (Dominguez-Whitehead and Sing 2015). But other forms of globalisation of education are also filling local gaps in higher education provision (Gunter and Raghuram 2018). For instance, IDE is growing in Africa and is a phenomenon that has the potential to transform people's lives by enabling students to gain access to university studies across borders without having to be mobile.…”

Boundary-crossing academic mobilities in glocal knowledge economies: new research agendas based on triadic thought

“…ii The notion of a trinity of actants has been discussed in different empirical contexts, such as changing geographies of Hungarian banking (Jöns 2001), the nature, geographies, and outcomes of transnational academic mobility in different disciplines and research practices (Jöns 2003(Jöns , 2006(Jöns , 2007, performer dance training (Camilleri 2015), robotic technologies (Del Casino 2016), and mega-event legacy theory (Dawson and Jöns 2017). In the context of boundary-crossing academic mobilities, the concept suggests three broader research perspectives, namely (1) the agency, movement, and interaction of people and other dynamic hybrids; (2) their ideas, imaginations, and emotions; and, as Gunter and Raghuram (2017) stress in this special issue, (3) the wide range of materialities that constitute research, teaching, and learning (Table 1).…”

“…This introduction situates the research foci of the five contributions to this special issue within a broader research agenda on academic mobilities, understood in the widest possible sense as spatial movements linked to universities, involving people and organisms, technologies and material things, knowledge and practices, imaginations and representations, communications and virtual information (Harvey 2005, 105;Urry 2007, 47;Jöns, Heffernan, and Meusburger 2017, 5). Situated within this wider agenda, this special issue joins research on the three established lines of people-centred inquiries with the mobility of institutional provisions by discussing inter-regional mobility for university education from Scotland to England (Findlay et al 2017); international mobility of students from the UK and India (King and Sondhi 2017); international branch campuses as regional hubs of international study in South Africa (Gunter and Raghuram 2017); and international knowledge transfer (Coey 2017) as well as intersectoral mobilities (Millard 2017) of European PhD graduates in the social sciences and humanities.…”