Reimagining internationalization in higher education: international consortia as a transformative space?

Abstract

From ongoing practices and rhetorics of globalization have emerged a new set of actors, logics and relations between and beyond institutions of higher education and research. As universities across the world continue to grapple with fundamental changes in resource structures and institutional missions, the ‘rolling back’ of state support and involvement in university governance has given way to more decentralized and market-oriented forms of organization, leading to new strategies for cooperation and competition. For a variety of reasons, universities are increasingly seeking to develop internationalization strategies and programmes as a part of their evolving institutional missions, and an increasingly important element of these strategies is engagements with and through international consortia. Despite the wealth of scholarship that has emerged exploring internationalization discourses as a predetermined institutional priority, there is a lack of scholarship on the politics and transformative potential of consortia as deliberative spaces capable of reframing internationalization agendas. This article attempts to sketch and interrogate the transformative potential of international consortia by developing a theoretical framework for agency in globalizing universities, and then exploring an empirical case from an international consortium of prestigious research universities in the Asia Pacific. By understanding the discourses and practices of internationalization as always ‘in the making’, we can draw our attention to where and how certain ideas, projects and norms of internationalization become established, and perhaps we can expand our ability to make them differently.

Keywords:

• internationalization
• higher education
• consortia
• agency
• globalization
• transformation