The New Geopolitics of International Higher Education (Part II)
- Emma Sabzalieva, York University, Canada
- Carolina Guzmán Valenzuela, Universidad de Tarapacá, Chile
- Jee Rubin, University of Cambridge
- Lakshmi Bose, University of Cambridge
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Continuing the exploration of how international higher education practices are shaping and being shaped by shifting global political dynamics, this seminar focuses on the interactions between the new geopolitics and universities’ day-to-day practices. The presentations provide two quite different perspectives on this common theme: one on the ongoing impact of historical-colonial forces and the responses of universities in Latin America, and the second examining intersections of power and politics arising from regional conflict and authoritarianism in Syria and Turkey.
Emma Sabzalieva will provide a brief introduction to the seminar, which is a follow up to CGHE Seminar 218 held in June 2021, reasserting the case for the importance and topicality of investigating the new geopolitics of international higher education.
Carolina Guzmán Valenzuela will present her paper ‘New and old forms of colonialism: critical border thinking in Latin American universities’, which examines scholarly work on old forms of colonialism based on a matrix of race and labour divisions and new forms of colonialism attached to prestige and international rankings, and shows that Latin American universities have developed both inward and outward-oriented mechanisms based on critical border thinking which mitigate these colonial forces.
Jee Rubin and Lakshmi Bose will discuss their work on ‘Political Imaginaries of Higher Education in Syria, Turkey and their Borderlands’. Their paper relates three seemingly disparate political ‘moments’ at universities across Syria, Turkey and their borderlands to ask how geopolitical shifts related to regional conflict and authoritarianism both shape and are shaped by higher education.
The presentations will be featured in a forthcoming special issue of the journal Globalisation, Societies and Education edited by Hannah Moscovitz and Emma Sabzalieva.
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Emma Sabzalieva is Senior Policy Analyst at UNESCO’s International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (IESALC) and a Research Associate at York University, Canada. Her current research projects include the futures of higher education, post-pandemic student mobility, the geopolitics of higher education, and the international education-immigration policy nexus.
Carolina Guzmán Valenzuela works at the Faculty of Education, Universidad de Tarapacá, Chile. Her research focuses on neoliberalism and its impact on universities, the public/private distinction in higher education, and the North-South divide and its influence on knowledge production.
Jee Rubin (they/them) is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. Their doctoral research examines the changing nature of youth-state relations in Syria and its diasporas. Rubin’s interests include state theory, education and conflict, feminist politics, and critical humanitarianisms in the Levant and beyond.
Lakshmi Bose is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge and is currently examining higher education and conflict in South Africa, Hungary, Turkey and the UK. Her PhD thesis explored how state security and surveillance shape intergenerational experiences of young female activism in Turkey and South Africa.
