Learning and Teaching (LATISS)

The internationalisation of higher education is a phenomenon that has been both driven by academic scholars and has been studied by them. ‘Internationalisation’ takes shape at different institutions as an initiative that often leads to the establishment of dedicated offices and staff, not to mention a dedicated campus lead in the form of what has been called the ‘SIO’, or senior international officer. Yet it is also a ‘process’, something that colleges and universities decide that they need to do or need to do differently because of a larger formation that is advocating for it, studying it, and advising on how to do it. Contributing to this formation are professional associations for those who are engaged in ‘it’ (e.g., the European Association of International Education, and the US-based NAFSA: Association of International Educators), communities who develop standards and trainings in how to do it (The Forum on Education Abroad's Standards of Good Practice and the ACE Internationalization Academy for the United States), and both longer-form publications and regular news sources tracking developments in it around the world (such as regular monographs from Stylus Publishing and the e-weekly University World News).

This article is a discourse analysis of a corpus of refugee ‘success stories’, produced and circulated in the United States by resettlement policy actors. I document and analyse the visual and discourse strategies employed in these narratives to represent an idealised conception of refugee experience, which narrates the efficiency and moral goodness of the United States and its resettlement policy regime. I argue that this process entails a ‘null curriculum’ (Eisner 1985), which are the refugee experiences and contexts that are systematically elided from the stories that policy actors produce and circulate about refugees success – in particular, the role of US geopolitics in refugee displacement, the role of resettlement policy in directing refugees to precarious labour, and the role of higher education and career development in refugee flourishing.

In 2022, several prestigious Chinese universities – often referred to as ‘key-point’ institutions in Chinese national policy documents – announced their departure from the global university ranking systems (GURS), and these announcements generated heated public discussions on the Chinese cyberspace. This article analyses the discussions on university rankings in the Chinese public media forums. By unpacking the diverse meanings that Chinese commentators attach to GURS and their deep ambivalence towards the value and use of GURS in Chinese universities, this article shows how GURS extend the Party-State framework of education vis-à-vis national pride in the Chinese public forums. In addition, this article shows how policy travels beyond the domain it originally targets and functions as sites where people engage in political commentaries.

This article mines the perspectives of inclusive educators-in-training as both subjects and agents of policy negotiations for inclusion. It investigates how the tensions between the 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) and Austria's traditional legislation on segregated schooling impact teacher education on the ground. Drawing on ethnographic field research, I highlight teacher-students’ personal perspectives which reveal some of the barriers to overhauling an education system that human rights advocate Marianne Schulze calls a ‘fossilized policy construct’ (2022). I also show how peopling the UNCRPD brings forward new subjectivities of teacher-students. Two aspects about how teacher-students understood their own profession as inclusive educators stood out. First, they sought out professional collaboration to build on each other's experiences with disability in everyday life. Second, they interpreted inclusive education as an intersectional concept which provided a lens to view some of their own experiences with exclusion and (in)equity.

While debates about internationalisation of higher education in the United States have traditionally been shaped by domestic political and economic interests (Hovey 2004; Reilly and Senders 2009), this article focuses on the peripheries of these domestically driven conversations, the terrains where study abroad takes place. We bring in voices of students whose publicly engaged work while abroad addresses critical sociopolitical issues from a transnational perspective. We use the concept of performative democracy (Matynia 2009) to frame these democratic interventions of students. Through speaking and acting in the public realm, they transcend individually and domestically oriented learning paths and engage with civic matters through a deterritorialised global imagination (Appadurai 1996; Gupta and Ferguson 1992). The students’ work, we suggest, challenges the continued pervasiveness of the homeland perspective in internationalisation policies and asks for their more expansive geopolitical framing.

The January 2015 massacre at the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and subsequent days of terror represented for many the challenges of building a more diverse and inclusive European Union. One response from the European Parliament's Culture and Education (CULT) Committee delved into questions of intercultural dialogue and tolerance. What lessons does the work of CULT during that period offer for coaxing or cajoling member states on educating against xenophobia and racism? This article explores the intertextual policy field in which CULT conducted its work, the report that this committee generated, and the response from the European Commission. I argue that the impact of CULT's report lies significantly in how it advanced the deep and broad intertextual work of the European Union.