Ethics, power, internationalisation and the postcolonial: a Foucauldian discourse analysis of policy documents in two Scottish universities

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a critical discussion of internationalisation in Higher Education (HE), and exemplifies a process of uncovering the investments in power and ideology through the partial analysis of four strategic internationalisation documents at two Scottish Higher Education institutions, as part of an ongoing international study into the ethics of internationalisation (EIHE).¹ A Foucauldian discursive analytical approach is employed in analysing the policy documents. It reveals the relationships between power and knowledge in the constitution of regimes of truth within internationalisation, while serving to interrogate the dynamics of the affective and ethical in the comprising of such relationships and imaginaries. A critical postcolonial theorisation works in tandem with a Foucauldian approach in uncovering the relations of power discursively at work and the discursive effects of power in institutional terms. Four key themes are identified within the documents and critically discussed. The discussions serve to demonstrate that a lack of critical engagement with internationalisation discourses in Higher Education has the effect of reifying a dominant view and suppressing the emergence of alternative discourses. A critical postcolonial lens facilitates interpretability of power dynamics through and beyond internationalisation in Higher Education to consider the ethical effects of such power in its investments in global inequality, injustice and oppression within the global modernist imaginary.

KEYWORDS:

• Internationalisation
• critical internationalisation
• higher education
• scottish universities
• Foucault
• postcolonial
• decolonial
• Foucauldian discourse analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Emma Guion Akdağ is an Assistant Professor at Heriot-Watt University. Supervised by Dr Dalene M. Swanson, her PhD research with the University of Stirling focusses on the ethics and effects of internationalisation, aiming to examine regimes of power by deconstructing a system of meaning-making constructed historically and discursively within the context of Higher Education in Scotland.

Dalene M. Swanson is a senior academic at the University of Stirling, an Adjunct Professor at the University of Alberta, and an International Research Associate in the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education at The University of British Columbia. Dalene writes from critical poststructural and post/de-colonial perspectives, and researches on critical internationalisations in HE, global citizenship, democracy education, critical development issues, African indigenous thought, and social and ecological justice. She is also a critical mathematics education researcher concerned with ‘the social construction of disadvantage’ in school mathematics contexts.

ORCID

Emma Guion Akdağ http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7370-0943

Dalene M. Swanson http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7704-1060

Notes

1. Ethical Internationalism in Higher Education in Times of Crises (EIHE) is a 23 institution, 11 country comparative study that was funded by the Academy of Finland (2012–2016); International PI: Dr Vanessa Andreotti; Scotland PI: Dr Dalene M. Swanson: http://eihe.blogspot.co.uk/.