Boundary-crossing academic mobilities in glocal knowledge economies: new research agendas based on triadic thought

ABSTRACT

This editorial introduction identifies a need for more multidimensional and collective theorizations of boundary-crossing academic mobilities in order to conceptualise this phenomenon, compare empirical findings, and identify new research perspectives. My suggestion is that triadic thought – or the thinking in three rather than two conceptual categories – overcomes some of the limitations that binary thought has imposed on social theory. By transforming the three conceptual dyads that frame this special issue on boundary-crossing academic mobilities, namely mobility/migration, students/academics, and local/global, into more differentiated relational triads, I argue that ordering and framing studies on academic and other mobilities through three-by-three matrices grounded in triadic thought helps to advance conceptual debate and unfold a wider research agenda in truly collective ways.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic mobility
• student migration
• higher education
• knowledge economy
• glocalisation
• triadic thought

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Heike Jöns http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9250-4780

Notes

1. I am grateful to Russell King for asking a question after my paper at the 1st International Conference on Geographies of Migration and Mobility (iMigMob) in Loughborough in July 2016 that alerted me to this ontological difference between the triads I had discussed. This helped me to develop my argumentation for the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference in August 2016, and in this article.

2. Triadic thought is represented, for example, by the sign/interpretant/object triad developed in semiotics (Latour 1993); by three-world-theories of Karl Popper (Zierhofer 1999) and Soja (1996); and even by the Christian doctrine of the holy trinity, which conceptualises one god in three forms (Jöns 2003, 148). The ‘trinity of actants’ also resembles in some ways the triad of material space (experienced space)/representations of space (conceptualised space)/spaces of representation (lived space) that Harvey (2005, 105) derived from Lefebvre’s (1991) deliberations about the nature of space. Yet, in Harvey’s (2005) understanding, lived space is not linked to the agency of humans, organisms, and robots but to people’s feelings, fantasies, and frustrations. Yet, if reordered and redefined, the terms material/lived/conceptual space would capture the three ontologically different realms of the trinity of actants rather well.

3. The POCARIM research project illustrates that large scale collaborative projects may struggle to create comparable surveys for all participating countries due to sampling issues, low response rates, and other challenges. Although the POCARIM online survey from 2013 comprised of very different sampling strategies across the 13 European partner countries (Kupiszewska et al. 2013), in eleven countries it was possible to produce distributed survey samples of SSH PhD graduates from several universities, i.e., from 8 to 9 institutions in the smaller countries of Hungary and Latvia and from 14 to 27 universities in the larger countries. Yet, the country samples for the UK and Switzerland were not comparable with the other survey samples, which has prevented further, but in fact very interesting, comparative survey analyses as yet (Jöns and Deakin 2014, 13). The UK sample included responses from 22 universities, but 78% of these survey responses were from the University of Warwick – 33% from its Business School –, while the responses from the nine Swiss universities clustered at the Universities of Lausanne (64%) and Lugano (19%).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by FP7 Support to the Coherent Development of Research Policies [grant number FP7-SSH-2011-3].