Reterritorializing the global knowledge economy: an analysis of geopolitical assemblages of higher education

Abstract

In this article, we analyse the geopolitics of higher education, which we understand as an assemblage through which the functioning of the 'borderless' and 'deterritorializing' dynamics of the global knowledge economy are respatialized. Discourses, objects and bodies constitute a geopolitical assemblage. We scrutinize in particular the geopolitical discourse of the knowledge economy, the construction of material and immaterial learning environments as one of its governmental technologies as well as the subjectification of individuals as specific kinds of professional citizens. We concretize this with an enquiry into the set of recent university reforms in Finland and the ways in which these contribute to the formation of transnational citizenship.

Geopolitics of the Knowledge-Based Economy

“…What, then, is the benefit of associating knowledge-based economization with the concept of geopolitics? As Anni Kangas and I have argued elsewhere (Moisio and Kangas 2016), geopolitics serves as a necessary antidote to the highly depoliticized representations which portray the knowledge-based economy, and associated social practices ranging from spatial and urban planning to higher education policies, as a mere pragmatic and technocratic enterprise. Tracing the geopolitical in the context of knowledge-based economization accentuates the post-Fordist economy as a site of strategic action where different political forces and actors, state and non-state institutions alike, pursue their strategies and realize their goals.…”

“…As a discursive process, knowledge-based economization has a self-actualizing quality. It produces a world which the discourses of such economization present as inevitable and which thus depoliticizes attendant societal development (see Moisio and Kangas 2016). The discourses of knowledge-based economization thus project a particular kind of future of necessity that is rooted in a conceived crisis of the present.…”

Pedagogic and learning spaces of leadership development: A sectoral case study

“…The concept of assemblages is applicable to these networks of institutions, the layers of networks of modalities, the policy space and the embedded pedagogic space. We read the concept as further developing our spatial and temporal understanding of socio-material and embodied realities (Decuypere and Simons 2016;Moisio and Kangas 2016). According to Koyama and Varenne (2012, 157), for example, assemblage "focuses analytic attention on how disparate material and discursive practices come together to form dynamic associations".…”

City regionalism as geopolitical processes

“…Of course, that vision is itself subject to political negotiation and contestation over time as can be illustrated by the case of Finland, which has been in a transition process from decentralized welfare state, to decentralized competition state, and eventually to a metropolis state. In the latter context, the future of the state is bound to the capacity of the state to anchor itself to the imagined global sphere through a few city regions (Moisio and Paasi, 2013) as well as particular spaces within these (Moisio and Kangas, 2016).…”