The growing demand to internationalize higher education curriculum and research has sparked a proliferation of partnerships between Global North and South (N-S) institutions and communities. Increased access to global travel and enhanced technology is facilitating student mobilities and raises critical challenges for educators preparing students to learn from Others (Todd, 2009). Further, recent policy produced by the Government of Canada calls for a dramatic expansion of student programming and research partnership with key sites in the Global South that align with a broader political and economic agenda (Government of Canada, 2014). This research challenges the possibilities and limitations for ethical relationship formation in N-S education partnerships with Others in the context of uneven material and epistemological globalization (Todd, 2012). How do educators think about ethical relationships between different knowledges? (Andreotti, 2007). How do Canadian educators ensure that in participation with N-S partnerships, we do not become facilitators for a new imperialism? (Tikly, 2004). How is it possible to prepare students, researchers and educators to understand the experience of Others in cognitive terms? (Sousa Santos, 2014). How do educators committed to social justice engage in practices that are vulnerable and responsive to Others? Findings are presented from research on a N-S partnership (research and international service learning) between a Canadian university and NGOs in Tanzania, which challenge the situating of N-S partnerships in humanitarian terms that privilege the righting of wrongs in a framework that conforms to northern interests (Spivak, 2004). This is compounded by the absence of engagement with Southern epistemologies (Sousa Santos, 2014).

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