Space, place and internationalisation of higher education: Exploring everyday social practices in the ‘international’ classroom

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to use a spatial approach to tease out implicit understandings of what is perceived as the ‘good’ student, the ‘right’ pedagogies and ‘legitimate’ knowledge in higher education internationalisation practices. We do so by attending to the social practices in the ‘international’ classroom and explore how such practices are shaped and impacted by students' various backgrounds, educational paths, prior knowledges and at the same time by structural, cultural and national characteristics of the host institution and the lecturers teaching there. The paper combines both lecturers' and students' perspectives and details the complex relationality of people and places connected through movement and performances of internationalisation. Inspired by critical internationalisation studies, we demonstrate how everyday practices and discourses in the ‘international’ classroom produce and reproduce global inequalities; thereby, we show some of the uneven geographies of higher education internationalisation.

Places and mechanisms of belonging and exclusion: Intra‐EU academic migration in a comparative perspective

“…Despite the favourable conditions for doctoral migrants, our findings reveal different mechanisms of belonging and exclusion in the academic environments we compared. As we have shown, a placebased understanding of 'appropriate' knowledge resources in HES, which has been demonstrated for students (Spangler & Adriansen, 2021), counts for doctoral migrants as well. By comparing places in national HES, we were able to demonstrate how particularities of academic environments matter in dynamics of belonging and exclusion even beyond the academic context.…”

“…Our research concerns a key question of this discourse, namely how skill is acquired and valorised across borders (Liu‐Farrer et al, 2021). We seek to explore a place‐based understanding of ‘appropriate’ knowledge in an internationalised field of higher education that has already been a topic in studies about international students (Spangler & Adriansen, 2021). This paper highlights its importance for doctoral candidates who are—unlike mobile post‐docs (Herschberg et al, 2018; Leemann, 2018)—still on the threshold of joining the academic workforce.…”

“…By ‘comparing places’ (Martiniello, 2013, p. 12), we examine the dynamics of belonging and exclusion related to incoming academic migrants in the context of the foreign HES that receives them. Our interest in ‘places’ draws on and contributes to debates in studies of higher education that consider social practices and encounters in a spatial context (Adriansen et al, 2022; Spangler & Adriansen, 2021). In contrast with the notion of ‘universality’ in international research and higher education, local settings and work sites still play a role (Jöns, 2007), both in terms of conditions they provide and by the way they are represented and imagined (Beech & Larsen, 2014).…”

“…interest in 'places' draws on and contributes to debates in studies of higher education that consider social practices and encounters in a spatial context (Adriansen et al, 2022;Spangler & Adriansen, 2021).…”

Emplacing English as lingua franca in international higher education: A spatial perspective on linguistic diversity

“…Further, our classroom observations showed that also the teachers reproduced these hierarchies in their interactions with students. Elsewhere, we have used these observations and the concept ‘the becoming of students' (Simandan, 2002) to capture specificities of what it means to be a ‘good student' in an international classroom in Denmark (Spangler & Adriansen, 2021).…”