Category: Capacity Building

Survey link for international students in the UK

Survey link for international students in Australia

This survey questionnaire asks international students about how they made decisions to study in British universities.  It is part of a research project called Governing complexity: future-proofing higher education internationalization in times of uncertainty.  This project is being conducted by Assistant Professor Dr Cora Xu from Durham University (United Kingdom), Associate Professor Dr Catherine Gomes from RMIT University (Australia), Dr Will Shannon from the University of Canterbury (New Zealand), and Dr Conrad King from Kwantlen Polytechnic University (Canada).  The overall results of this survey could be shared with the public via academic publications, conferences or reports.   

You are invited because you are currently an international student in the UK. This survey is anonymous.  Any personal identifying information will not be stored with your anonymous survey responses, and your survey responses will be managed in a separate database.    

Participation in this research is voluntary. If you don’t wish to take part, you don’t have to.  You can withdraw at any time by simply closing your web browser prior to completing the survey. If you decide to continue to fill out this survey and click ‘submit’, you are giving your written consent for your data to be included in this research anonymously. Please kindly note that since this data will be kept anonymously, once you submit your answers it will not be possible to withdraw your data from this research.

The survey questionnaire contains 14 questions and should take about 15 minutes to complete. 

Survey link for international students in the UK

Survey link for international students in Australia

It is the dictionary on Mobility and Borders, edited by Tommaso Visone and Caterina Di Fazio and possibly published by Columbia University Press. Please find more information here.

If you are interested in writing one or few entries for the dictionary, please indicate which terms you would like to author/co-author in this preliminary term list.

Asia Pacific Education Review – Special Issue Call for Papers
Asia as Method: Toward Ontologies and Epistemologies of Difference

Special Issue Editor

Kevin Kester, Seoul National University (kkester@snu.ac.kr)

Educational researchers have long sought insights for domestic education by drawing on lessons learned from abroad. The home context is normalized within these traditions as the centre from which the other is understood. But rarely has the field examined the ontological changes of educators themselves working abroad, and the implications this holds for challenging and transforming accepted theoretical and pedagogical norms of the field.

As long-term international work provides insights that transcend simple travel abroad or traditional ethnography, this Special Issue explores how university educators working abroad in the long-term experience ontological and epistemological transformations. A longer period of employment and life abroad provides unique insights as the educator goes through personal ontological and epistemological transformations via ‘border thinking’ that informs his/her analysis (T. Kim, 2014; Rappleye & Komatsu, 2017).

Theorizing the borders, Gloria Anzaldua (1987) writes, “the borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where the lower, middle and upper classes touch” (preface). She goes on to illustrate with the US-Mexico border as an example, “The US-Mexico border es una herida abierta [an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds” (p. 3). Educators working in international contexts encounter these ontological and epistemological borders daily and are brought to grapple with the role of Otherness in their scholarly practices. Mignolo and Tlostanova (2006) write, “Border thinking is the epistemology of the exteriority; that is of the outside created from the inside” (p. 206).

At the same time, the Western gaze in recent years has been critiqued as the hegemonic lens through which education is theorized (Silova et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2015), and scholars in East Asia (and elsewhere) have called on Asian and non-Asian educators alike to think beyond Western-centricity and beyond domination-oriented thinking (Chen, 2010; B.Y. Kim, 2002; Takayama et al., 2018). These scholars argue against Western-centricity and against the adoption and adaptation of Western (as well as domestic exclusionary) concepts as mechanisms of control by scholars and the political elite (T. Kim, 2016; Vickers, 2020).

In reference to the East Asian context bringing West and East together, Chen (2010) states, “The Taoist concept of taiji, as a structural totality in place prior to the existence of yin and yang, has to be analyzed on two levels. On the higher level, the unity of yin and yang is complementary and indeed encompasses a totality. But on the lower level, yang is higher than yin, and the former governs and encompasses the latter” (p. 264). Chen’s double critique here of Western-centric practices and domestic hierarchies – e.g., caste, class, and gender – is especially visible for those educators who working long-term abroad encounter the constraints and affordances of difference.

This Special Issue, then, asks: How are educators’ theoretical and pedagogical practices informed by migration across contexts? What sorts of ontological and epistemological transformations might educators experience during long-term periods abroad? How might these transformations initiate decolonial moves in regard to educational pedagogy, policy and practice?

This Special Issue explores these questions within and beyond the context of Asia drawing on the unique insights of diverse educators. Importantly, beyond examining Asia as a defined territory or entity that is distinct from the West, this Special Issue looks toward the ways that Asia, the West, and the Global South co-exist within each other. Drawing on Kuan-Hsing Chen’s (2010) Asia as Method and Gloria Anzaldua’s (1987) Borderlands, the issue seeks to re-center Asia within educational discourse, not as an object of analysis but as an agential subject. To deeply access issues of ontological and epistemological transformation, this issue welcomes a diverse range of methodologies, such as reflexive and contemplative inquiry, autoethnography, qualitative empirical research, conceptual/philosophical methods, and other approaches.

We invite manuscripts that deal with these questions from diverse authors. All papers should be written as reflections on ontological and epistemological changes that scholars of/in Asia experience by embracing and/or working in other cultural contexts. Brief manuscript proposals (500 words) are due by October 1, 2021, and should be submitted to Kevin Kester at kkester@snu.ac.kr.
Please reach out to the Special Issue editor with any questions or comments.

The following timeline is expected:

October 1, 2021: Submission of abstracts.

October 22: Invitation to submit full manuscript.

March 11, 2022: Submission of full manuscript.

April 15: Completion of first round reviews.

May 13: Submission of revised manuscripts.

June 10: Completion of second round reviews.

July 8: Submission of final manuscript.

July 29: Notification of final acceptance.

August 26, 2022: Proposed publication date.

Instructions for Submission

Please send proposals to Kevin Kester at kkester@snu.ac.kr by October 1, 2021. Proposals will be reviewed by the editorial team and authors of successful abstracts will be contacted by October 22.

Full manuscripts (6000-8000 words excluding references) are due by March 11, 2022, to be submitted through the journal’s regular portal on its homepage. Please indicate in the submission that the paper is being submitted as a part of the Special Issue. Further details are available on the APER website: https://www.springer.com/journal/12564.

References

Anzaldua, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books.
Chen, K.-H. (2010). Asia as Method. Duke University Press.
Kim, B.-Y. (2002). Korean Education Viewed from a Post-colonial Perspective. Humanities Research 5: 149-176.
Kim, T. (2014). The Intellect, Mobility and Epistemic Positioning in Doing Comparisons and Comparative Education. Comparative Education 50: 58-72.
Kim, T. (2016). Internationalisation and Development in East Asian Higher Education: An Introduction. Comparative Education, 52, 1-7.
Mignolo, W., & Tlostanova, M. (2006). Theorizing from the Borders: Shifting to Geo- and Body Politics of Knowledge. European Journal of Social Theory 9: 205-221.
Rappleye, J., & Komatsu, H. (2017). How to Make Lesson Study Work in America and Worldwide: A Japanese Perspective on the Onto-Cultural Basis of (Teacher) Education. Research in Comparative and International Education 12: 398-430.
Silova, I., Rappleye, J., & Auld, E. (2020). Beyond the Western Horizon: Rethinking Education, Values and Policy Transfer. In G. Fan & T. Popkewitz (Eds.), Handbook of Education Policy Studies (pp. 3-29). Springer.
Takayama, K., Sriprakash, A., & Connell, R.W. (2018). Toward a Postcolonial Comparative and International Education. Comparative Education Review 61: S1-S24.
Vickers, E. (2020). Critiquing Coloniality, ‘Epistemic Violence’ and Western Hegemony in Comparative Education – The Dangers of Ahistoricism and Positionality. Comparative Education, 56, 165-189.
Zhang, H., Chan, P.W.K., & Kenway, J. (2015). Asia as Method in Education Studies: A Defiant Research Imagination. Routledge.You have access to our articles

Research Highlighted:

Green, B. (2021). Virtue Signaling: Problematizing Creative Labor Within Knowledge Socialism. Postdigital Science and Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-021-00231-x

Beginning in 2018, Beijing Normal University (BNU) Distinguished Professor Michael Peters began a collaborative project that would see a decades-in-the-making theory of cognitive political economy – knowledge socialism – transformed into a philosophy of praxis based on commons-based peer-production (CBPP), collective intelligence, and creative labor. My research identifies and problematizes the virtue signaling of creative academic labor within knowledge socialism as a critical flaw which may serve to further proletarianize and exploit upstart scholars enlisted within this experimental process of teaching, writing, and publishing. Moreover, this research outlines a class of prosocial academic entrepreneur within China higher education (HE) whose commitment to the collective common good is measured by their ability to ensure a professional livelihood. Knowledge socialism represents an attempt by various scholars in the field of philosophy of education to foment a radically open political economy of non-rivalrous knowledge production/consumption that counters the neoliberal paradigm of knowledge capitalism. Specifically, knowledge socialism, as a ‘radically-open’ political economy of knowledge, entails the desire to engender within the scientific community a form of collegiality, which in the vein of Ivan Illich, unlocks the emancipatory potential of collective human thought for the public good. From a Marxist standpoint, the concept of knowledge cultures was developed to represent inclusive communities of inquiry whose creative academic labor constitutes the engine which drives knowledge socialism. Through co(labor)ative writing, editing, and publishing efforts, knowledge socialism aims to foreground knowledge within a sociality which challenges the problematic norms, values and practices of the ‘lone individual scholar’ and the institutions under which it was created. While this theory has been utilized in the past to create co-authored edited volumes, open access research articles, as well as open access online forums and journals, this was the first time that this theory would be tested within a HE classroom setting, consisting wholly of graduate students rather than well-established journal editors, and professors in the field of philosophy of education.

Thus, began the experiment of knowledge socialism at BNU’s Faculty of Education, wherein over the course of several years, the pedagogy of knowledge socialism was developed alongside more practical productive facets towards an alternative political economy of unfettered knowledge. Specifically, throughout this experiment at BNU, several well-met research articles have been published within the auspices of knowledge socialism. For example:

Peters, M. A., Hollings, S., Zhang, M., Quainoo, E. A., Wang, H., Huang, Y., … Green, B. (2021). The changing map of international student mobility. ACCESS: Contemporary Issues in Education, 41(1), 7–28. https://doi.org/10.46786/ac21.7444

Peters, M. A., Oladele, O. M., Green, B., Samilo, A., Lv, H., Amina, L., … Tesar, M. (2020). Education in and for the Belt and Road Initiative. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 52(10), 1040–1063. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1718828   

Peters, M. A., Wang, H., Ogunniran, M. O., Huang, Y., Green, B., Chunga, J. O., … Hayes, S. (2020). China’s Internationalized Higher Education During Covid-19: Collective Student Autoethnography. Postdigital Science and Education, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00128-1

It is important to note that these articles were guided by Professor Michael Peters, but overwhelmingly drafted, written, and edited by graduate students (both international and Chinese) from the Faculty of Education. To be sure, the publication of these articles showed quite clearly the positive productive capacity of knowledge socialism. Moreover, these articles provided rich insights into topics like the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), HE Internationalization, student mobility, and pandemic education. However, while this collaborative process brought invaluable insights to both those involved as well as readers interested in the aforementioned topics, questions began to arise as to whether knowledge socialism (in its present form) might represent a viable alternative to knowledge capitalism.

With this in mind, my research article outlines several core productive elements of knowledge socialism as required to create a ‘commons’ which contributes to both the public good and the livelihood of commoners. These elements are creative labor, collective intelligence, and commons-based-peer-production (CBPP). Much of the research concerning collective intelligence and CBPP emphasizes the inherent virtuous character of those volunteering their creative labor to collaborative projects. Specifically, many scholars cite Wikipedia as a model of CBPP based in the virtuous volunteerism of cognitive laborers. It is clear why such a model of collective knowledge production might be used to theorize a way out of our contemporary ‘tragedy of the knowledge commons’, wherein knowledge is produced, extracted, and commodified by publishing regimes within institutionalized HE. However, throughout the course of my research it became clear that rather than developing a substantive method of valuation for the creative academic laboring of those contributing to these research projects, knowledge socialism was promoting a form of ‘virtue signaling’ which expected and relied on voluntary, de-valorized ‘virtuous’ labor contributions to the commons. In this way, rather than acknowledge the increasing precarity of contemporary scholars within the academy, knowledge socialism was positioning these students within a mythical, carefree academic class. As a lead on many of these projects, I fielded message after message from students worried about their academic futures, outlining their desire to contribute, while struggling with the idea that their collective efforts would fall outside of the first, second, or third author metrics required to graduate. Throughout the entire process, from enlistment in the project to final publication, these students were overwhelmingly concerned about order of authorship for the purpose of grant funding, faculty positions, scholarships and graduation. Thusly, it became increasingly clear that those who contributed to these research projects represented a class of ‘prosocial academic entrepreneur’ who wished to contribute to the common good while also securing their livelihood in the process. This point also provides further credence to the understanding that students of HE in China, while inhabiting what Rui Yang describes as a Confucian political climate geared towards collective societal development, also inhabit the same performativity requirements of neoliberal institutionalized HE. As a result of this research, those wishing to enlist the creative academic labor of students within China HE, must understand the performativity requirements and inherent precarity of these scholars as they seek to promote an economy of knowledge that both valorizes and supports those laboring towards a revolutionary transition to knowledge socialism.

Researcher Bio

Dr. Benjamin Green is a recent graduate (June 2021) of Beijing Normal University, Faculty of Education, and current Zhi-Xing US-China Leadership Fellow. His recent works have focused on China HE, US-China relations, global governance, digital nationalism, critical cosmopolitanism, and Chinese Internationalism as a contested project of alternative modernity. He can be contacted via email: benbo83@gmail.com, Weixin: benbo83.

40 new COST Actions have just received funding from the EU and are about to be launched in autum 2021 (several non-EU countries also participate in the actions). COST Actions are major international and interdisciplinary research networks, organised in various thematic working groups. The actions run for four years and include funded networking events, conferences, skills trainings and short term scientific exchanges for junior researchers.

The following new actions may be of interest for some of you:

CA20115 European network on international student mobility: connecting research and practice

(see https://www.cost.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/oc-2020-1_Actions_Booklet.pdf, p. 17)

CA20137 Making Early Career Researchers’ Voices Heard for Gender Equality

(see ibid., p. 39)

For more details on COST as well as ongoing actions see: https://www.cost.eu/