A School of Education Research Seminar Hosted by the Centre for International Education Research
Presented by Professor Susan L Robertson, former Professor of Sociology of Education and Head of Faculty, University of Cambridge
Higher education mobility programmes around the globe have been key initiatives over the past thirty years, driven by combinations of supranational and national state-led knowledge economy policies, university strategies, and decisions made by individuals regarding employability, credentials, or academic tourism.
In this presentation Professor Robertson argues that mobility too often is understood through the prism of internationalism, itself umbilically tied to and nourished by Enlightenment liberal thinking, such as Kantian cosmopolitanism, and the romantic figure of the wandering scholar. This has the effect of reducing our understanding of transnational mobility to individual actors, their desires, and experiences. Yet we can also see that transnational mobility in higher education is also shaped by macro-geo-political and geo-economic dynamics historically tied to empire-making and state building, whilst newer projects are aligned with market-making.
In her presentation, Professor Robertson examines contemporary transnational mobility dynamics through the prism of two nations, the UK and China, and argue that a more capacious use of imperialism; as strategically taking economic, political and/or cultural forms, is more useful for understanding their different modalities in the UK compared with China.
Professor Susan L Robertson is former Professor of Sociology of Education and Head of Faculty, University of Cambridge, UK; she is now Affiliated with the Faculty, is currently a Fellow of Wolfson, and Distinguished Professor at Aarhus University. She has written extensively on transformations of the state and education, cultural political economy, and the making of education markets. Susan is founding and current co-editor of the journal Globalisation, Societies and Education.
Susan will present her article from 2-3pm and will meet PGR students from 3-4pm