To enhance international exchange and cooperation, the nccr – on the move offers Visiting Fellowships for senior and junior researchers from abroad, who wish to collaborate with our network for a duration of two to three months.
Further information on the eligibility and the application and selection procedure can be found here.
The deadlinefor application is 15 October 2023.
For questions, please contact the Education, Careers and Equal Opportunities Officer of the nccr – on the move robin.stunzi@nccr-onthemove.ch
January 18-19th, 2024, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland
Career expatriates, highly skilled (temporary) migrants, privileged migrants, mobile professionals, transnational corporate elites, or digital nomads: these are terms that have been used to describe highly educated professionals who move abroad voluntarily for career reasons. They are relatively well-paid professionals who do not necessarily stay in the destination permanently but move on after a few months or years.
While many countries welcome these skilled professionals, national immigration policies and multinational employers tend to focus on the worker as a detached and highly mobile individual whose talents and expertise are needed. Less attention has been paid to the fact that these experts are embedded in family relations and often have children and spouses/partners who either move abroad with them or stay behind. When the literature does center the expatriate worker’s family members, it does so with concepts like “Third Culture Kids” or “trailing spouses” that tend to frame mobility as a disruption that must be managed as opposed to considering how transnational mobility constitutes family life in particular ways.
This symposium focuses on the experiences of mobile professionals and their families. We seek fresh perspectives to explore new configurations of work, mobility, and family life through the prism of transnational movement and in the context of an uneven global economy. Contributions discussing the experiences and situations of internationally mobile children or partners and spouses are particularly welcome, as are reflections on the multiplicity and heterogeneity of the phenomenon.
We aim to address several questions in this symposium, including but not limited to:
Who is privileged and in relation to whom, and how does this relate to the experiences of the accompanying or left-behind family members?
How is family life performed through transnational mobility, and not just in spite of it?
Who becomes an internationally mobile professional, for what reasons and what are the short- and long-term consequences of this for their families?
How are mobile professionals and their families situated in the shifting arrangements of work in the aftermath of the pandemic and rise of platform capitalism?
How do race, class, and gender intersect in the “doing” of family life as professional workers move abroad and across national borders?
How are mobile and digital technologies affording new ways of parenting, shaping experiences of childhood, or enabling alternative performances of family life on the move? What are the limitations of such technologies with regard to family-making in transnationally mobile contexts?
How do children and/or spouses/ partners experience the transnationally mobile lifestyles?
What are the potential methodological dilemmas (and possible solutions to them) of studying families, including young children, on the move?
Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent to mari.korpela@tuni.fi by October 13th, 2023.
The symposium is free of charge but participants are required to pay for their own travel, accommodation and food.
The symposium consists of a keynote lecture, a presentation of the project “Expatriate Childhood” (by Mari Korpela), participants’ presentations and discussions.
The keynote lecture on Thursday January 18th will be given by Professor Jennie Germann Molz (College of the Holy Cross, USA). The title of her lecture is “Digital Nomad Families: From Worldschoolers to Mompreneurs”.
Further information: mari.korpela@tuni.fi Mobile professionals and Families Symposium Tampere city – Visit Tampere Funded by Research Council of Finland and Tampere University
Knowledge sharing is seen as a process involving the donation or collection of knowledge by both the provider and the recipient (Tangaraja et al., 2016). In higher education, knowledge sharing involves faculty and students sharing their knowledge, experiences, insights, and ideas among themselves. International students are fundamental actors in the knowledge sharing process in higher education (Gamlath and Wilson 2022). They play an important role in enabling universities to generate new knowledge and innovation through their contribution to knowledge sharing, intercultural exchange and research (Singh 2009; Pagani et al. 2020; Luo, 2023). Currently, little is known about the knowledge activities of international students and how knowledge sharing processes unfold in higher education. To address these research gaps, this study takes the first step toward delineating the process of knowledge sharing by taking account of international students as knowledge source. This article show how they shape this process to provide more nuanced evidence to discuss the role of international students in knowledge sharing.
Research Method
Based on a qualitative approach, this article studied how the knowledge sharing process in higher education unfolds through the case of Chinese international students in Russian universities. Purposeful sampling techniques were used and a total of twenty-one Chinese students participated in the study. Data for the study came primarily from semi-structured interviews and triangulation of evidence through observation and literature review. In order to elicit specific knowledge-sharing experiences from international students, the critical incident technique was used. Data analysis involves a constant comparison between data and emerging theoretical structures, and a three-step process is used to analyze the data.
Findings
The results of this study, firstly, clarify the knowledge roles of international students. That is, international students are not only knowledge receivers but also knowledge providers. We found that international students are not ‘deficits’, rather they have developed or embedded knowledge and are shaping multicultural exchanges. Secondly, the article sheds light on the micro-processes that take place during knowledge sharing in higher education institutions. The results of this study were synthesized into a proposed model of the knowledge sharing process, describing the activities and four stages associated with knowledge sharing for international students: Prerequisite, Initiation, Unidirectional sharing and Evaluation. We found that international students are influenced by key factors in the knowledge sharing process, and the relative weights of each factor vary across the four stages of knowledge sharing. We also found that knowledge sharing by international students in higher education institutions is a gradual and dynamic process. There may be a shift from one-way providing to two-way exchange during this process.
The result of the current study provides a starting point for subsequent research in knowledge management and higher education. This study elaborated on the processes of knowledge sharing that have not been investigated in previous studies, and the results contribute to understanding the knowledge roles and behaviors of international students. This study provides information on how to provide support at each identified stage to facilitate knowledge sharing by international students. Higher education needs to move away from deficit thinking and adopt a more inclusive and multicultural approach to supporting international students (Nada and Araújo, 2019) to facilitate knowledge sharing among international students and to promote a virtuous cycle of knowledge communication in higher education.
References
Tangaraja, Gangeswari, Roziah Mohd Rasdi, Bahaman Abu Samah, and Maimunah Ismail. 2016. “Knowledge Sharing is Knowledge Transfer: A Misconception in the Literature.” Journal of Knowledge Management 20 (4): 653–70. https:// doi.org/10.1108/JKM-11-2015-0427.
Singh, Michael. 2009. “Using Chinese Knowledge in Internationalising Research Education: Jacques Rancière, an Ignorant Supervisor and Doctoral Students from China.” Globalisation, Societies and Education 7 (2): 185–201. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767720902908034.
Pagani, Regina Negri, Bruno Ramond, Vander Luiz da Silva, Gilberto Zammar, and João Luiz Kovaleski. 2020. “Key Factors in University-to-University Knowledge and Technology Transfer on International Student Mobility.” Knowledge Management Research & Practice 18 (4): 405–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/14778238.2019.1678415.
Gamlath, Sharmila, and Therese Wilson. 2022. “Dimensions of Student-to-Student Knowledge Sharing in Universities.” Knowledge Management Research & Practice 20 (4): 542–56. https://doi.org/10.1080/14778238.2020.1838961.
Nada, Cosmin I., and Helena C. Araújo. 2019. “‘When You Welcome Students Without Borders, You Need a Mentality Without Borders’ Internationalisation of Higher Education: Evidence from Portugal.” Studies in Higher Education 44 (9): 1591–604. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2018.1458219.
Luo, Yunxin. 2023. “International Student Mobility and its Broad Impact on Destination Countries: A Review and Agenda for Future Research.” Industry and Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1177/09504222221150766.
Yunxin Luo is a PhD candidate in Economic and Management program at the Saint-Petersburg University. She pursued her bachelor’s degree in Management at Henan University (China) and master’s degree in Education at the University of Adelaide (Australia) before attending the Saint-Petersburg University (Russia) to pursue her PhD. Her research is interdisciplinary, and lies at international migration, global mobility, human capital circulation, knowledge management, with the focus on international students and young talents. Her recent publications appear in journals such as Studies in Higher Education, International Journal of Consumer Studies, and Industry and Higher Education.
The Centre for Research in Educational and Social Inclusion invites you to attend ‘Capitalising on the intellectual bequest of Pierre Bourdieu for social and educational equity’
This seminar will present three papers, each from an established Bourdieusian scholar. More information about schedule for the day below.
10am-10.15am Acknowledgements and Welcome
10.15am -11.15am Paper 1 and Q&A Culture or structure? A Bourdieusian take on the curriculum of formal education
This theoretical paper presents a Bourdieusian framing of formal curriculum that was developed for a study of shadow education or private tutoring. Neo-institutionalism has been the dominant sociological theory in shadow education research. It understands shadow education in terms of a world culture of education and a schooled society. The world culture of education is thought to constitute the schooled society; and by the same logic, to motivate institutionalisation of shadow education. In contrast, it is structure that is socially constitutive in Bourdieusian theory. Bourdieu looked to the evolution of the structures of fields, including that of education, to explain modernity with its capitalist ethos. In these terms, shadow education is an investment in the cultural capital and symbolic power of the curriculum institutionalized in mass formal education. This theorisation is useful for understanding curriculum-making struggles in institutional, programmatic and instructional domains.
Karen Dooley is a Professor in the Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice, Queensland University of Technology. Karen’s research focuses on curriculum in conditions of economic disparity and linguistic and cultural difference. She works with classic theories from the sociology of education, including those of Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein. Karen is currently completing one Australian Research Council Discovery project on shadow education, and is partway through another about home-school connections in times of digitalisation. Karen has taught from early childhood to university in Australia and as a English as a middle school foreign language teacher in China.
11.15am-12.15pm Paper 2 and Q&A Bourdieu and Sayad’s contributions to knowledge via multi-language modes of research: Postmonolingual theorising as a method of thinking critically
This study makes an original contribution to methodological knowledge by establishing grounds for postmonolingual theorising as a method of thinking critically. A familiar research practice for making an original contribution to knowledge entails applying, critiquing, and/or extending the signature conceptual products of internationally renowned scholars such as Bourdieu. In contrast, this study argues that efforts to make an original contribution to knowledge also benefit from the problematisation of such taken-for-granted research practices. This study identifies the place of multiple languages in Bourdieu and Sayad’s (1964/2020) mode of research practice employed in their Franco-Algerian field study, albeit practices of theorising that they do not explicitly address. Arguably, multi-language practices of theorising are worth considering for evaluating their use for making an original contribution to knowledge, for challenging monolingual research practices, and for capitalising on researchers’ multi-language capabilities, including those theorists who only speak (multilingual) English.
Michael Singh is a Professor at Western Sydney University. He investigates possibilities for, and constraints on collective counter-agency through research that does not conform to dominant expectations or norms (hysteresis). Focusing on continuing historical struggles over languages in research-informed, education policy practices, Singh explores postmonolingual theorising as a research method for mounting critiques of the logic and practices of domination. Singh works with Higher Degree Researchers to capitalise on misrecognised intellectual cultures, using divergent funds of theoretical knowledge in their repertoire of languages for making original contributions to knowledge. Recently, Professor Singh co-authored Localising Chinese: Educating Teachers through Service-Learning with Dr Nhung Nguyễn, and Postmonolingual Critical Thinking: Internationalising Higher Education through Students’ Languages and Knowledge with Dr Lù Sī Yì (陆思逸).
12.15-14.30 Lunch 14.30-15.30 Paper 3 and Q&A Social problematics and the role of philosophical anthropologies: Evaluating Bourdieu’s framework
Philosophical anthropologies (PAs) – ontological assumptions about human species-nature – have been controversial in sociological research since Foucault rejected all need for them. Bourdieu resisted this post-PA tide. Agreeing with Bourdieu that PAs are unavoidably assumed in explaining social problematics, I explore his conceptual framework for necessary PAs and how they interact with his worthy analytic concepts for sociological research: e.g. ‘habitus’, ‘field’, ‘forms of capital’. Yet I question Bourdieu’s assumed PA of a ‘libidinal’ need for recognition that drives competitive power-games in social fields. I argue further that a PA is needed-but-missing in Bourdieu’s framework to explain how field participants enact agency to challenge power-games in pursuit of social-ethical purposes for their labours. Drawing on survey data in which Australian education academics comment on how workforce restructures affect their labours, I find the needed PA in Karl Marx’s ‘use-value’ and ‘alienation’ concepts. I thus advocate a ‘Marxification’ of Bourdieu’s framework.
Lew Zipin is a Senior Research Fellow at UniSA; an Honorary Fellow at Victoria University, Melbourne; and an Extraordinary (adjunct) Professor at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. His research, scholarship and practice draw on Bourdieu for sociological analysis of how mainstream school curriculum selectively (re)produces unjust power inequalities. At the same time, he takes up the Funds of Knowledge (FoK) approach to socially-just curricular use of knowledges which have asset-value in lifeworlds of students from marginalised social positions, but which school-worlds too-typically treat as ‘deficits’. Lew thus combines Bourdieuian analysis with FoK praxis in ways that reciprocally fill gaps in combining strengths of each.
The seminar will be delivered synchronously face-to-face and online.
Date Monday 25th September 2023
Time 10am – 3:30pm (ACST) please convert to your local time
Venue UniSA Mawson Lakes Campus GP2.39 or via Zoom
Yang, Y., & MacCallum, J. (2022). A three-dimensional multi-world framework for examining cross-cultural experiences of international doctoral students. Studies in Continuing Education, 44(3), 493-509. https://doi.org/10.1080/0158037X.2021.1890569
Introduction
International doctoral students encounter constant and varied challenges, old and new, while studying abroad. To gain insight into the nature of experiences of doing a PhD abroad, this paper presents a three-dimensional multi-world conceptual framework, illustrated with an in-depth case study. The study is based on a broader narrative inquiry that aimed to understand influences that facilitate or constrain students’ positive and timely completion of a PhD abroad.
The literature
There are three main lines of research on doing a PhD and doing it abroad: (a) doctoral supervision in research; (b) student factors in achieving a PhD abroad; and (c) the social aspect of international doctoral students in the host community. Studies highlight the inherent challenge of achieving a PhD and achieving it in a cross-cultural context. We recognise three areas need further research: (a) the evolving nature of students’ experiences; (b) the situated nature when interpreting an individual student experiences; and (c) the interactive nature of international doctoral study. In short, we know certain factors influencing doing a PhD abroad; we are yet to know how these factors in combination affect student experiences.
Constructing a three-dimensional multi-world framework
Acknowledging previous conceptualisations and their limitations, the conceptual framework (Fig. 1) comprises a multi-world (Research-Personal-Social worlds) model, a dynamic mechanism that highlights transitions across borders, and a three-dimensional CIS (Continuity-Interaction-Situation) space that contains the multi-worlds and the transitions.
Fig 1. The three-dimensional multi-world framework
Component I: The multi-world model
From the literature and our data analysis, we conceptualised research, personal, and social as indicative of three ‘worlds’ – meaning cultural spaces for individual and communal beings and doings in this study – that encompassed doctoral experiences. These worlds are all interconnected and intertwined, partly contingent upon and partly independent of each other.
Component II: Transitions across and borders in-between
In the three-dimensional multi-world framework, there are overlapping areas as experiential interfaces where transitions occur and lines in-between as borders, or boundaries, to cross. Hypothetically, harmonious/congruent interrelationships, or smooth transitions, between the worlds enable multilateral growth and sustainability, whereas incongruent relationships may cause negative impacts in the multi-worlds.
Component III: The three-dimensional CIS space
The framework also sets a three-dimensional Continuity-Interaction-Situation space to contain a student’s multi-worlds and transitions across over time. The framework conceptualises experiences in an educational setting: continuity and interaction, which underline the co-existence and the interplay of the person and contexts. As experiences occur in specific spaces and sequences of spaces, Situation is drawn as a third dimension to formulate the three-dimensional inquiry space.
Method
Yuyan (pseudonym), a female student from China was chosen for this study to illuminate the affordances of the framework. Her experience represents both typical and atypical features of participants in the overall project with Chinese international STEM PhD students.
Results
Before presenting findings from the perspective of the three-dimensional multi-world framework, we developed a cameo to preserve the fidelity and coherence of Yuyan’s experience before, during, and after the PhD abroad. With this as background, we presented the framework-underpinned analysis and incorporated discussion in the subtitles below.
Research, personal, and social worlds of doing a PhD abroad
Research world: Support, opportunities, and recognition count
A research world has its expectations for the attainment of a PhD, engaging both perceptible and imperceptible factors to facilitate or constrain achievement. In Yuyan’s case, the perceptible aspects include supervisors, peers, institutional support, research facilities, and external connections; whereas the imperceptible aspects involve collaboration, facilitation, communication, and time.
Personal world: Philosophy and perseverance count
In the personal world, an international student exercises agency traversing from the personal world to other worlds to attain the PhD abroad. A personal world involves what a student brings from pre-PhD into the PhD, e.g., values, beliefs, motivations, and expectations; it also encompasses how the transformation occurs in the process of the PhD, e.g., in Yuyan’s case, growing into an independent researcher with a vision to embrace multiculturalism.
Social world: Connection and integration count
For an international doctoral student, the social world is not only about music, games, romance, and social events; it is also about, even more importantly, two-way communication and accommodation of different cultures, customs, and perspectives in both academic and social settings. While doing the PhD abroad, Yuyan’s social world was mainly shaped by a collective social space from both of her academic and social networks.
Transitions across borders between the multi-worlds
Transitions across research and personal worlds: ‘A swaying journey’
With a dramatic change from an undergraduate to a PhD, Yuyan’s transitions across the research world had been extremely difficult, particularly at the initial stage. She recounted she had been through ‘a swaying journey’, struggling between a frequent change of feeling confident and lacking in confidence, all depending on the progress of research.
Transitions across personal and social worlds: ‘Chou Tong Chun Yi’
Yuyan exercised strong agency to achieve transitions between her personal and social worlds in the host community. She conceded it was easy to stay in the comfort zone with her conational networks, but to create harmonious relationships with the host community, Yuyan attended and even proactively organised social activities with her peers and staff members.
Congruence relieves emotional ‘down’ moments
While Yuyan had to manage linguistic, academic, sociocultural, socio-economic, and gender challenges while doing the PhD abroad in a male-dominated engineering field, the congruence with doctoral colleagues appeared to have helped her further crossing socio-emotional and psychosocial borders between the multi-worlds.
Continuous, interactive, and situated features of PhD abroad experiences
Continuity: Change and transformation
This dimension accentuates change and transformation over time, which are embedded in an evolving process of pursuing the education, enculturation, and socialisation. From China to Australia, from an undergraduate to a PhD, Yuyan’s experience exhibited how Yuyan, her supervisors, and many others modified the process to enable change and growth out of the PhD.
Interaction: Congruence and relationships
The dimension of interaction highlights the continual interplay of the research, personal, and social worlds, which provides opportunities for international doctoral students to develop interculturality and necessitate identity change through everyday engagement within the PhD community. Yuyan stressed that she had to interact with various others to progress her research because ‘it’s never a one-person’s battle’.
Situated experiences: Self-sufficiency, innovation, and enjoyment
This dimension underlines striking characteristics of situated experiences in terms of motivations, relationships, experiences, and time. With enhanced confidence, passion, and vision in research, Yuyan pursued after a higher goal to initiate an additional cutting-edge experiment towards the end of her PhD.
Conclusion
This paper contributed a three-dimensional multi-world conceptual framework to understand the complexity of achieving a PhD abroad in a holistic approach. The framework is expected to provide a conceptual foundation for future research and practical work engaged with international doctoral students. For research, the framework can be applied to examine the experiences of international students in different fields and at different levels, making comparisons of differences and congruence between the multi-worlds to identify commonalities and classify patterns from the uniqueness of each individual case. For educational practice, this framework provides supervisors and institutions with a way of thinking of international doctoral students from a more comprehensive perspective and in a continuous, interactive, and situative approach.
Authors’ Bio
Yibo Yang, Associate Professor, PhD, Deputy Dean for the International Organizations and Global Governance, School of International Studies, Harbin Institute of Technology, China. Her current research interests focus on internationalisation in higher education, international organizations, research methodologies, and academic writing.
Judith MacCallum, Professor Emerita, PhD, College of Health and Education, Murdoch University, Australia. Her research and teaching interests focus on social interaction for learning and development, with emphasis on motivation, mentoring and professional learning.
Network for Research into Chinese Education Mobilities (NRCEM) 