The widening number of students, staff (academic and non-academic), and higher education institutions over the last decades, entailed an increasing complexity within this sector. At the same time, interest in researching higher education grew significantly, as the number of scholars and studies in the field multiplied, while the themes and topics addressed by researchers became more diverse. Being so, higher education studies has accumulated a substantial body of specialist knowledge in recent decades, based on a wide range of methodologies, theoretical frameworks, and research designs applied in a multidisciplinary field of research (Tight, 2019).

Within this field of research, EERA’s network 22: Research in Higher Education has been active for 25 years as a significant hub bringing together researchers from across Europe and beyond to present and discuss their work, with the aim of promoting links between scholars in different regions.  The network started its activities at the ECER 2000 in Edingurgh, but the focus of research presented at these annual conferences has evolved      considerably since then, as it has accompanied major changes and challenges within the higher education sector. 

The proposed paper is based on a project, funded by EERA, which examines symposia presented at ECER conferences within network 22 over the last ten years.The option to analyze symposia is grounded on the acknowledgment that this format presentation requires that at least three different countries/national perspectives arerepresented within the papers included in a symposium. 

As such, this option is well suited to mapping international collaboration between researchers by exploring which countries are represented in symposia and looking at which national cases are presented in these conference sessions. Additionally, the analysis is expected to provide an overview of the themes being addressed, as well as theoretical and methodological approaches  chosen by researchers over the years.

Overall, the paper draws on the idea of international collaboration in research to guide the examination of the European dimension of higher education research presented at       ECERs     . Akbaritabar and Barbata (2021) utilized network analysis to study international co-authorship collaborations and discovered that scientific collaboration in higher education tends to occur predominantly within national borders, leading them to conclude that higher education is not a field with a strong international focus. This conclusion is converging with the argument for the existence of national silos around researchers based in the USA and in the UK where authors tend to engage with research based and focusing on their own national cases, stressed by Tight (2019) on the basis of his      various investigations combining quantitative meta-analysis with primarily qualitative systematic review applied to almost 1000 scientific articles in total. Additionally, Avdeev (2021) examined collaboration patterns in higher education research via the Scopus database and found that the intensity of collaboration is negatively correlated with geographical distance and positively associated with linguistic similarity.

Acknowledging these trends, epistemic inequality emerges as a complex and relevant concept that relates to very specific occurrences about how work by academics in different countries may not be treated equally in the European context. Fishberg, Larsen and      Kropp (2023) note that the production of knowledge rarely stems from a level playing field when exploring examples of unequal Europeanisation and epistemic inequality in the composition and hierarchies of project teams and  countries chosen for research investigations related to a small number of Horizon 2020 Social Science collaborative projects. As with large collaborative research projects and project applications, participation in a symposium depends on being invited to join a team, which may itself contain hierarchies and epistemic inequalities.    

In our project, we conduct a descriptive and social network analysis of the symposia papers presented under the six sub-strands of NW22: Research in Higher Education. The dataset was compiled from publicly available conference program materials spanning ten years (2014-2024) on the EERA’s website. The symposium papers from over 40 ECER sessions were analyzed regarding the key topics, theoretical framework, methods, and national contexts being researched, as well as the authorship of the papers, and the institutional affiliations of authors, chairs, and discussants. For the descriptive part, we will present the qualitative analysis of the key topics, theoretical frameworks, methods used, and national contexts being analyzed in the papers. Categorization of key topics, theoretical frameworks, and methods adopted is organized following an inductive strategy that aims at identifying of patterns and singularities within the research presented at the NW22 symposia in the last ten annual ECERs. Social network analysis is utilized to investigate the evolving knowledge structure and collaboration dynamics within the Research in Higher Education Network. Specifically, the analysis focuses on (1) keyword co-occurrences within papers to examine conceptual relationships and (2) country-level collaboration patterns within papers and symposia. To explore the evolving knowledge structure of Research in Higher Education Network, an undirected and weighted network of keyword co-occurrences within papers was constructed. This network represents relationships between concepts based on their co-occurrence, and edge weights indicate the frequency of these connections. Temporal modeling of this network, considering the year of symposia, was employed to reveal the evolution of research topics within NW 22. For the dynamics of collaboration in NW22, two types of networks were developed: (1) a co-authorship network reflecting country-level collaboration in the studies presented at symposia and (2) a symposium attendance network capturing connections between countries where researchers’ institutions are located, based on joint participation in the symposium. In both networks, nodes represent countries, and edges indicate co-authorship ties or joint symposium participation, with edge weights reflecting the frequency of collaboration. Several centrality metrics, including degree, betweenness, and eigenvector centrality, were computed to identify key concepts and countries and to assess network structures. Visualized graphs depict relationships between keywords and countries. The visualization and analysis were conducted using the R packages igraph and ggplot2

The ongoing analysis of symposia presented within NW 22 - Research on Higher Education - at ECERs over the last ten years is expected to contribute to the mapping of international collaboration in this context, exploring whether and how a relationship between geopolitical and epistemic inequality can be traced. Focusing on knowledge production within Europe is particularly relevant as most of the work already developed has been thinking about global epistemic inequality through the lens of Eurocentrism and utilising the language of a Global North and South (Fishberg, Larsen & Kropp, 2023). Additionally, the analysis is expected to contribute to a deeper knowledge about topics, theoretical frameworks and methodological options within the multidisciplinary field of higher education research. Further exploration of researchers’ countries and regions of origin and the way this is linked to theoretical and methodological choices in the development of their work becomes a relevant line of inquiry. This is because geopolitical location is likely to be related to theoretical and methodological issues underpinning knowledge production. For example, those working in smaller countries might be more likely to both engage with research from other countries and look beyond their own system, given the importance of connecting their own research with studies published in English speaking journals for dissemination of their work results (Tight, 2019).

Akbaritabar A, Barbato G. An internationalised Europe and regionally focused Americas: A network analysis of higher education studies. Eur J Educ. 2021; 56: 219–234. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.12446 Avdeev, S. International collaboration in higher education research: A gravity model approach. Scientometrics 126, 5569–5588 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04008-8 Fishberg, R., Larsen, A. G., & Kropp, K. (2023). The ‘where’ of EU social science collaborations: How epistemic inequalities and geopolitical power asymmetries persist in research about Europe. The Sociological Review https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00380261231201473 Lozano, S.; Calzada‐Infante, L.; Adenso‐Díaz, B.; García, S. Complex network analysis of keywords co‐occurrence in the recent efficiency analysis literature, Scientometrics (2019) 120:609–629 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03132-w Maltseva, D.; Batagelj, V. (2020). Towards a systematic description of the field using keywords analysis: main topics in social networks, Scientometrics (2020) 123:357–382 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03365-0 Tight, M. (2019). Higher Education Research – the developing field, Bloomsbury Academic.