Session Information
23 SES 11 C, Globalising Europe Through Education: Knowledge, Power and the New Imperialism?
Symposium
Contribution
The University of New South Wales (UNSW) in the antipodes is signatory to the European based Bologna Process. In taking this step, a senior University official noted that ‘it is much easier for our graduates to find places in the world and in universities around the world’ (The Australian 26/03/08, p.27). With around 14 Australian institutions preparing to comply with Bologna standards, UNSW’s embrace of Bologna is far from a solitary exercise. The Australian story is a part of a larger expansion of Europe’s Bologna based regulatory standards echoed in various regions across the world, from Latin America and the United States to Africa. The widespread adoption of these standards in public universities, often with encouragement and endorsement of national educational bureaucracies, is symptomatic of a broader rescaling and restructuring of the governance of higher education institutions. In an influential work Sassen (2006) has highlighted the importance of the denationalisation of public governance by which she implies that the process through which authority and political rule increasingly spills out of national territorial containers. The tenor of this argument is that the process of globalisation and market reform leads to not merely the simple zero sum transfer of power, but also to a reconstitution of the scales on which governance takes place. This rescaling of higher education, particularly through new modes of regional governance, is the core subject of this panel.
This four part panel addressed these processes through focusing upon Europe and the globalisation of Europe’s higher education architecture. Presenters will be asked to consider one or more of the following questions: (i) how are these ‘regional’ and inter-regional projects being imagined geographically, politically, economically and culturally, and what is the role of higher education in this? (ii) what techniques are being deployed in the constitution of these new regions/interregional relations? (iii) whose interests/projects/politics are being advanced and whose are produced as absent through these particular higher education/development models and technologies? (iv) what is the relationship between the projects and strategies of regional and inter-regional projects and national and sub-national (domestic) economies; (v) what are the citizenship and social justice implications of these new transnational higher education spaces? (vi) what is the relationship between these inter/regional projects and the governance of higher education and research? (vii) what emulations, partnerships and historical relations of dependency are mobilised in these processes? (viii) are new as/symmetries of power being produced through these new geo-political and geo-strategic alignments? and (ix) what new conceptual, empirical and methodological challenges are being generated in these developments for the study of higher education and state-society-economy relations?
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