Empowered or disempowered by mobility? Experience of international academics in China

ABSTRACT

There is a noticeable reverse flow of academics from the Global North to the Global South in the recent decade. The study examines the emerging mobility trend by investigating three institutions in China. Based on case studies of traditional universities and Sino-foreign universities, the study argues that international academics in Chinese universities have experienced individual empowerment in terms of expanded academic networks and enhanced professional development. But they might face collective disempowerment due to the different professional values and protocols such as ‘routinised improvisation,’ and a lacking of bargaining power resulted from the university's inexplicit institutional power dynamics and a hierarchical approach to management. The findings suggest that the construction of international academics’ experience is a process shaped and re-shaped by the interplay across individual interpretation, institutional configuration and national context, and reveal the complexities of higher education internationalisation in countries at the periphery of the global higher education landscape.

KEYWORDS:

• Foreign academics
• international faculty
• academic mobility
• higher education internationalisation
• China

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank all participants involved in the study for generously sharing their experiences and reflections.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The terms ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’ do not denote specific geographical locations. ‘Global South’ is a dynamic term used to describe regions that have been historically dominated and/or negatively affected by capitalist exploitation and/or racial discrimination. In recent years, scholars attributed new meanings to the term that addresses ‘the resistant imaginary of a transnational political subject that results from a shared experience of subjugation under contemporary global capitalism’ (Mahler 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the [Projects of Humanities and Social Sciences of Zhejiang Province] under the Grant [20NDJC034YB].