Higher education internationalisation has been deemed instrumental to creating and exchanging knowledge and to educating globally engaged students for an ever more fast-moving, complex, and interconnected world. Yet for some years now critical perspectives on the development and current orientation of internationalisation have been emerging, expressing concern about the risk of reproducing already uneven global hierarchies through mainstream internationalisation activities, particularly in institutions of the Global North and Western/ized higher education institutions. Since the beginning of the European colonial expansion in the sixteenth century, Western knowledge has become dominant across the world (Schwöbel-Patel, 2020). Travelling with the colonisers, ways of knowing, influenced by Western ethnocentrism, imposed a monolithic world view, and added new layers to Europeans’ position of control and power (Akena, 2012). Knowledges from the Global South were delegitimised and marginalised, while Western thinking was considered as legitimate knowledge (Schwöbel-Patel, 2020). Coloniality has shaped the relationship between the Global North and the Global South, and the enduring colonial-like, unequal global relations continue to influence knowledge production and circulation (Dei, 2008). Critical scholarship on epistemic diversity in higher education has illustrated that Western hegemony maintains its position of dominance and authority (R’boul, 2020).

Universities are one of the key agents in the dissemination and legitimisation of knowledge. However, due to universities’ historical focus on Euro-American traditions, international students from non-Western backgrounds have often been treated as passive receivers of ‘Western wisdom’ (Tange & Kastberg, 2013). Previous research has shown that the knowledge of international students is largely seen as inferior (Stein, 2017), and many international students report that their indigenous knowledges are not recognised within the Western higher education landscape (Dei, 2000; Zhou et al., 2005). Considering the skewed geopolitics of knowledge and the entanglement of knowledge circulation and international student mobility, it is indeed relevant to ask whether internationalisation of higher education is yet another way to promote Western knowledge and maintain Anglo-American hegemonic domination.

International student mobility, higher education, and knowledge mobilities have been discussed in relation to particular places of the world, depicting Europe, North America, and Australia as assumed centres of knowledge production  (Jöns, 2007). The geographical location of universities plays a pivotal role in attracting international students with respect to their decisions of where to study (Kölbel, 2020). Places are positioned hierarchically, and student mobility is driven by the differential worth ascribed to particular countries (Waters & Brooks, 2021). This has implications for students’ mobilities and the re/production of established hegemonic knowledge centres in Europe and the US and emerging ‘knowledge hubs’ in Asia, reinforcing asymmetric power relations (Jöns, 2015), and it is concerning that internationalisation becomes Westernisation (Liu, 2020).

Fundamentally, this paper is concerned with how international student mobility is embedded within a global regime of hegemonic knowledge centres, built on the structures and foundations that imperial and colonial practices laid down. It seeks to explore knowledge legitimacy and the role international student mobility plays in the re/production of global hierarchies and the promotion of certain kinds of knowledges. By taking on a critical orientation, I wish to promote social and cognitive justice and challenge taken-for granted norms and epistemologies. I focus on power relations and the dynamic interrelation of knowledge and power. I wish to discover and recognise different ways of knowing and bodies of knowledge practised and circulated by students and lecturers in and beyond university classrooms.

The project is a cross-national study between the UK, Denmark, and Germany, anchored in ethnographic fieldwork. In each country, I follow a group of international degree master’s students at one university. I use participant observation in different educational spaces (e.g., classrooms, study groups, social events) on and off campus with the aim to study the (spatial) interconnectivity and negotiations of different forms of knowledge. I conduct timeline interviews (Spangler, 2022) with the international students to capture their life paths and geographical mobilities across space and in time. I use go-along interviews as a type of mobile ethnographic interview method. Walking with the students is a unique way of gathering knowledge, while, at the same time, it also captures other ways of, for instance, knowing about the world, pushing back against the dominance of modern, objective knowledge (which we mostly meet and are required to perform in formal educational settings). Further, I am offering a zine making workshop for international students. Zines are small (maga)zines and historically originated from underground movements of marginalised communities to record and share their stories (French & Curd, 2021). This continues in current times in which zines operate at the intersection of activism and art as a form of social action. I understand zine-making as a chance to do research with, rather than on international students, encouraging them to express themselves through the active process of creating. I also collect semi-structured interviews with lecturers to learn about their perspectives on teaching and learning in an ‘international classroom’, pedagogical approaches, and classroom practices. Engaging in the everyday life of my participants and spending time in the same social spaces as them allows me to comprehend moments of interaction, practices, and knowledge creation. This provides me with insights to the kinds of knowledges the individual institutions provide, produce, and seek to spread, how incoming international students’ knowledges are selectively incorporated or dismissed, and what types of knowledge circulate in the respective institutions and in what ways both lecturers and students engage in and enable this process. Following the international students also beyond the campus allows me to see how the students make and learn place; walking with them their everyday mobilities and placemaking practices provides me with an understanding of how learning, knowing, but also becoming happens through these entanglements of bodies, humans, and the socio-materiality of place.

This project explores how contextualised factors of engagement or participation are differently perceived and evaluated as in/valid contributions or legitimised forms of knowledge. It studies what and where certain forms of knowledge (including e.g., languages, behaviours) are privileged and hegemonic, and, thereby, investigates how internationalisation or interchangeably student mobility affects and enables processes of knowledge sharing and production, and what knowledge circulates and eventually gets disseminated. The everyday, social practices in, for instance, an ‘international classroom’ are shaped by the students’ various educational and cultural backgrounds and by structural, cultural, and national characteristics of the host institution and the lecturers teaching there. The ‘international classroom’ thus becomes some sort of meeting point and a dynamic place of knowledge sharing and in ways negotiation of legitimacy. The various trajectories of international students involved in educational mobility create a web of extended, multiple connections and complex relations, often across long distances. In a classroom, where international students and lecturers meet, various trajectories, backgrounds, and knowledges merge. This project constitutes an original contribution by addressing macro questions of knowledge, power, and global hierarchies through examination of the micro-experiences of international students and staff in three different locations. It seeks a deeper engagement with relational, ethical, and political issues of internationalisation and mobility to understand but also put forth new approaches to forms of knowledge production, classroom practices, and pedagogies. The findings of this research will have relevance for the growing field of critical internationalisation studies, providing new empirical insights on how spatial associations of knowledge and relations of (global) power manifest and become articulated in interactions and ways of knowing. At the point of the conference, I will have finished fieldwork in all three countries (around 1 year in total) and present empirical accounts from the different places.

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