Comparative and International Education / Éducation comparée et internationale
Special Issue on Pluralizing Educational Mobilities
Guest Editors: Ian Craig, University of the West Indies; Kalyani Unkule, O.P. Jindal Global University, Law School Santiago Castiello-Gutiérrez, Seton Hall University; Jean-Blaise Samou, Saint Mary’s University
The journal of Comparative and International Education / Éducation comparée et internationale invites manuscripts to be considered for a Special Issue on “Pluralizing Educational Mobilities,” to appear in Summer 2024. In recent years, there has been a critical turn in international education scholarship (including education abroad), placing a stronger focus on issues of equity and inclusion, which trains a decolonial lens on research and practice around international mobilities, especially in light of the ongoing disruptions (social movements, global pandemics, wars, climate disasters) that have transformed our world in the past few years. The aim of this Special Issue is to contribute to this endeavour by presenting research in the area of educational mobility that further diversifies meaning-making around this activity by, amongst other approaches:
- giving greater voice to internationally mobile students from the Global South, exploring their experiences with the same qualitative attention that has been bestowed on their counterparts in the Global North, with due critical consideration of the many complexities that may trouble that binary construct.
- examining contexts for student mobility that are hitherto under-researched, particularly in the Global South.
- drawing on alternative epistemologies and situated cultural knowledge that are typically beyond the purview of current mainstream international education research, thereby offering alternative narratives, tropes and framings that enhance understandings around internationalization in particular contexts.
- harnessing collaboration between researchers across scholarly disciplines, thereby bringing complementary or disruptive external perspectives to bear on study abroad scholarship, or collaboration across roles in student mobility, such as between scholars, practitioners, administrators and student-participants.
This Special Issue thus seeks to open new pathways towards a fuller understanding of the contingent and multifaceted nature of this activity, paying due attention to the nuances of cultural context, subject positioning and historical conjuncture, amongst others, that bear on any experience of study overseas. The following questions are relevant:
- What are the motivations and experiences of education abroad in and from contexts not typically reflected in the field of international education scholarship thus far?
- For these individuals and contexts particularly, what is the interaction between international experiences and broader processes and systems such as curricula, institutional internationalization, international relations or development politics?
- To what extent and how is this critical turn towards equity in the field having a meaningful impact on the way that student mobility is conceptualized, managed and experienced, both by student participants but also by administrators and other actors?
- Which alternative narratives or situated cultural understandings might broaden or nuance understanding of study abroad experiences? Are there templates and historical experiences of mobility which would fundamentally disrupt and re-orient language and practices of “othering”, assumptions of “knowability” and instrumental framings of “cultural competence” currently pervasive in international education, particularly study abroad?
- How can study abroad be further and more meaningfully decolonized, both as a scholarly field and an activity? What kind of ripple effects might this have for practices of knowledge creation and dissemination within higher education more broadly – for example: curriculum diversification, internationalization strategies, programme evaluation and reform?
Critical scholarship shows how the conception, structuring, and directions of educational mobilities are rooted in and strengthen dominant worldviews while instrumentally engaging with other ways of being and knowing. Pluralizing educational mobilities therefore includes pluralizing the ways in which we create and disseminate knowledge about them as a field of research and practice. In this spirit, this Special Issue will consider texts which:
- Situate the meaning, purpose, nature, outcomes and ethics of mobility in alternative cosmologies and historical experiences.
- Reflect stylistic and methodological approaches which embody reflexivity and emphasize context-specificity in research and its implications for practice.
- Extend possibilities for bridging critical scholarship with programming practice, particularly through further reflection on conceptual framings, tacit assumptions, linguistic usage, and scope of enquiry in existing literature.
For this Special Issue, CIE / ECI welcomes articles in English, French, or Spanish presenting original research and scholarship on the specified topic. Submitted articles will be subject to the standard peer review process, must follow the current style guidelines of the American Psychological Association, and include a title and an abstract (up to 150 words). Manuscripts should not exceed 8,000 words, including all notes, quotations, and references. Manuscripts must be submitted through the journal’s online system.
Submission deadline: full manuscript October 1st, 2023.
For submission information, visit: http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cie–eci/styleguide.html
If you have an idea for a submission but are not sure whether or not it falls within the scope of this Special Issue, you may submit, by May 15th 2023, a 500-word proposal to ian.craig@cavehill.uwi.edu. Your proposal should cover the following (as applicable): context and purpose for the study, methodology, preliminary findings, implications for research and/or practice, a statement about how the proposed submission pluralizes educational mobilities. This prior submission is optional and all final submissions will be considered for inclusion solely on the basis of the blind peer-review process.
This special issue arises from the work of the Global Collective for Study Abroad Researchers and Administrators (GCSARA), which is the recipient of a Connection Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Authors are encouraged to visit www.gcsara.org.
Managing Editor: Xin Fan
Network for Research into Chinese Education Mobilities (NRCEM) 