The Shifting Geographies of Trans-national Academic Mobility: Challenging Conventional Policy Paradigms

Abstract

Trans-national academic mobility is becoming increasingly common in a globally mobile world. And higher education research policies of many nation-states around the globe seek to promote it. For example, the European Research Area’s stated aim is to fund European, not national, research on a European scale, thereby foregrounding the important role of academic mobility within Europe. Policy driven definitions of academic mobility characterise it in terms of ‘knowledge transfer’ (European Commission 2000), ‘knowledge networks’ or ‘networks of excellence’ (European Commission 2007). But within higher education research policy do theories of ‘knowledge transfer’ engage sufficiently with the content and context of knowledge transfer? Our different interrogations of the policy literature in our research projects lead us to observe that in different policy circumstances there is a relative dearth of discussion about the kinds of knowledge that readily travels, the knowledge that most and least requires or benefits from travel, how knowledge travels or why it travels in the manner that it does. Indeed, there is little reference to the ways in which knowledge is transformed or otherwise through travel across national, cultural and political boundaries. This leads us to argue that the current theoretical and methodological groundwork for understanding academic mobility, and that informs policy, is inadequate.

Method Different forms of evidence we draw from include historical, ethnographic and comparative approaches framed in terms of understandings of global ethnographies, cosmopolitanism, diaspora and historical descriptive analysis.

Expected Outcomes The presentations in this symposium will examine whether current paradigms yield enough interpretive power with regard to the global movement of academics and knowledge. They will also consider if they offer the best basis for research policy development in the global context. The presentations will show why academic mobility matters and how it matters differently in different nation-states around the globe and at different times in a nation’s development. Overall, we hope these studies of the experiences of academic mobility in other places and times will help to inform European policies.