Transformations of modern/colonial higher education: cartographies of domination and re(dis)order

This paper critiques the modern/colonial imaginaries of higher education internationalisations(s) and their reliance on Northern/Western politico-epistemological privilege. Drawing on the Ethical Internationalisation in Higher Education project (EIHE), social cartography (Paulston, 2000) serves to map multiple Western-centric imaginaries of HE, animated by: the scholastic or religious; the canonical or ‘classical’; the civic; and the corporate (Andreotti, et al. 2016, p.5). Ambivalences and contradictions that traverse these imaginaries are mapped by three discursive orientations: neoliberal, liberal and critical, and four interfaces. The necessitarian logic (Munck, 2003) of neoliberal austerity deploys scarcity as political rationality, while competition fetishisation (Naidoo, 2016) and shallow national policies act to remap HE as a battleground between different HE logics and imaginaries. Such political opportunities are utilised to re-spatialise isonomic and heterogenous actors into vertically configured fields of power. This remapping acts to delimit the public sphere and is destructive of collective ‘good(s)’, reconstituting spaces of public knowledge and education into investments of domination, accumulation and privatised consumerism. Concomitantly, global citizenship discourses in HE in(ter)fuse with neoliberal and neoconservative discourses to remake the world according to an ‘empty logic’ of entrepreneurialism and corporatisation underpinned by Machiavellian management logics that reorganise the university through divide and rule politics.