Universities as Transformative Social Spaces: Mobilities and Mobilizations from South Asian Perspectives Andrea Kolbel
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UniversitiesasTransformativeSocialSpaces:MobilitiesandMobilizationsfromSouthAsian Perspectives
AndreaKolbel(ed.)etal.
https://doiorg/101093/oso/97801928655710010001
Published:2022 OnlineISBN:9780191956188 PrintISBN:9780192865571
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Published:May2022
Subject: SociologyofEducation
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Endorsements
Tis is a wonderful and timely edited collection, focusing on higher education in South Asia through the lens of student mobilities and mobilizations. It features a truly interdisciplinary collection of empirically rich and theoretically innovative contributions, from an impressive range of scholars. To date, higher education scholarship has yet to take seriously the interrelationship between mobilities and student mobilization, and the focus on South Asia is most welcome indeed. I cannot wait to share this book with my students and colleagues.
Johanna L. Waters, Professor of Human Geography and Co-Director of the Migration Research Unit, University College London
South Asia’s universities are gaining in importance and size, and they are sites of social negotiations and reconfgurations. Students contribute to dynamic transformations by their chosen pathways, mobilities, and actions. Te book, written by an engaged interdisciplinary group of scholars, concentrates on students’ agency, analysing their choices, visions, critiques, and actions. It allows a thorough understanding of the ‘social lives’ of contemporary universities in South Asia.
Emeritus Professor Ulrike Müller-Böker, Human Geography, Department of Geography, University of Zurich
Tis splendid collection of papers addresses the profound changes that are taking place in higher education systems throughout South Asia. Te distinctiveness and originality of these papers lie in their focus on the complex relationship between issues of student mobility and mobilization—the ways in which the diverse forms of this relationship reveal the changing relations of power and the dynamics of diversity, identity and belonging, and point also to the challenges of democratization of higher education.
Fazal Rizvi, Emeritus Professor, University of Melbourne and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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UniversitiesasTransformativeSocialSpaces:MobilitiesandMobilizationsfromSouthAsian Perspectives
AndreaKolbel(ed.)etal.
https://doiorg/101093/oso/97801928655710010001
Published:2022 OnlineISBN:9780191956188 PrintISBN:9780192865571
Published:May2022
Subject: SociologyofEducation Acknowledgements
Thispublicationresultedfromtwoacademicworkshopsandanumberofexchangesbetweentheauthors whosetextsweproudlypresent BothworkshopswereheldattheCenterforInterdisciplinaryResearch(ZiF) attheBielefeldUniversityinGermany The rstworkshop‘Student Mobilities and Mobilisations in South Asia Global Challenges Local Action’tookplaceinJune2016andwasfundedbytheZiF.Thesecondworkshop ‘Global Students: Mapping the Field of University Lives’washeldinDecember2017andwasco-foundedbythe ZiF,bytheInstituteofGeography,UniversityofBern,Switzerland,andbytheInstituteforWorldSociety, UniversityBielefeld Theeditorsareverygratefulforthe nancialassistance,andtheywouldliketothank thehighlye cientanddedicatedsta attheZiF:MsMarinaHo mannandMsTrixiValentininparticular.
TheeditingprocesswassupportedbyfundsprovidedbytheUniversitiesofBernandofBielefeld thatwe wouldliketoacknowledge OurspecialthanksgotoMsAstridDinterforhersecretarialassistanceandtoMs MollySilerforlanguageediting WealsothanktheOxfordUniversityPressfortheprofessionalsupport throughouttheeditingprocess.
AndreaKölbel,JoannaPfa -Czarnecka,andSusanThieme p viii
Universities as transformative social spaces
Joanna Pfaf-Czarnecka, Susan Tieme, and Andrea KölbelIntroduction
A 2015 issue of Te Economist was titled, ‘Te whole world is going to university’. An increasing amount of people all over the world are participating in university education; the number of those enrolled is expected to double within the next decade. Te rapid expansion of the worldwide student body results in increased heterogeneity of its rank and fle, with students difering in their ascribed characteristics, resource endowments, interests, skills, expectations, and imaginative potentials. Academic aspirations have intensifed so substantially that student debts have become an important economic factor (Waters 2006, 2009). In view of these developments, many tensions appear within the social spaces of universities and have transformative potentials. From the view of students, participation in higher education can be a very ambivalent experience; going through a university program can be a period of great freedom, widening horizons, and social openings but also of heteronomy, discipline, and conficts. Encompassing broad heterogeneity within its spatially delineated, physical premises but also in the increasing virtual interactions, the university can be seen as a complex social space where very diverse personal trajectories may intertwine, confront one another, or run parallel to each other.
Internationalization ranks high among the strategies embraced by universities competing for infuence, prestige, and wealth in the global race (Shore and Wright 1999; Findlay et al. 2012), especially in the West but also increasingly in numerous Asian countries (Pfaf-Czarnecka 2020).
Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, Susan Thieme, and Andrea Kölbel, Introduction
In: Universities as Transformative Social Spaces. Edited by: Andrea Kölbel, Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, and Susan Thieme, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI:
In 2017, UNESCO (2019) counted over 5.3 million international students who are defned as students pursuing all or part of their tertiary education in a country other than their home country. Te number of international students more than doubled in less than two decades, from 2 million in 2000. Nearly all of this growth takes place in the Global South, with a major part in China and India alone (UNESCO 2019). Te much commented-on increase in the number of internationally mobile students (Altbach and Knight 2007; Brooks and Waters 2011; Lipura and Collins 2020; Waters and Brooks 2021) is an expression of the striking expansion of national higher education systems around the world. More and more, the operation of universities is being infuenced by marketization as well as by various metrics that bolster competition (Jongyoung 2011). In the quest for universities to enter the top ranks, the equality norms dedicated to accommodating the increasingly heterogeneous student bodies are balanced against neoliberal policies that more and more universities endorse.
Te global challenges and adjustments of universities also bear heavily upon South Asian universities and societies. On the one hand, universities in South Asia face similar problems as the majority of universities elsewhere with shortages of funds, tendencies towards massifcation, and organizational constraints while competing for status, infuence, and wealth (UNESCO 2015, 2009). On the other hand, problems are more accentuated when we consider the global range and diversity of stakeholders. While elite universities in South Asia, as elsewhere, have been caught aspiring to be in the high ranks among the stif international competition, students from the most marginalized communities and remote parts of their countries strive for admission to poorly endowed universities and ofen face numerous obstacles during their studies and as they seek employment (Jefrey et al. 2008; Kölbel 2020a; Kumar 2012; Deshpande and Zacharias 2013; Ovichegan 2015). Social disparities are particularly exacerbated by an elite sector that recruits from itself for few, leaving the bulk of the population with very limited prospects of employment. Tis results in tensions and political mobilizations at universities. Tese tensions are reinforced by students’ positionings along with diacritical markers such as gender, class, ethnicity, and caste, as well as at their intersections. Furthermore, student politics—as will be shown in the chapters by Kumar and by Kuttig in this volume—closely relate
to contentious politics carried out by political parties in diferent South Asian countries. South Asian universities: Past and present dynamics
Today, universities in South Asia are at a crossroads (Béteille 2010). Te student body has changed signifcantly in the last decades: in size, demographic composition, needs, aspirations, and expectations. People of diferent social backgrounds and diverse cultures come into contact with each other on the university premises (see the chapter by Renschler and Gerharz in this volume), resulting in the crossing of manifold social forces and infuences. Student choices, visions, and voiced critiques have exerted signifcant pressure on individual institutions as well as on entire systems of higher education all over the subcontinent. Against this background, this book demonstrates how current transformations of South Asian universities and student bodies are intertwined with changes affecting society at large.
Multiple paradoxes and forms of ambivalence are at work here. Te global norms of equity and inclusion come into play amid pronounced societal hierarchies accompanied by the widely shared conviction that social mobility via education is possible and necessary. However, the modern promise of individual development and fulflment via education stands at odds with the ongoing (and perhaps even increasing) diferentiation of opportunities in the academic realm (Rao 2012; Jefrey 2008; Kumar 2016; Naudet 2018) and is already apparent in school education (Macpherson et al. 2014; Tapan 2014, 2015). Universities are, therefore, sites of very diferent struggles: institutional and individual competitions in an accelerating world; the struggle for the preservation of universities as protected spaces for refection, (social) innovation, and as transmitters of impulses aimed at societal transformations.
South Asia as a world region has a history of thriving knowledge production that was afected early on by globalizing forces (Reetz’s and Pradhan’s chapters in this volume). Many key South Asian academic institutions were established in the colonial era, while important institutions of higher learning such as Taxila (today’s Pakistan) and Nalanda
(today’s India) were founded signifcantly earlier. Te engagement in colonial education proved to be transformative with the adaptation of external standards of education and professionalism as well as for the acquisition of knowledge and skills needed to improve or even challenge the system (see the chapter by Raina and Jodhka in this volume).
In the post-colonial period, realms of higher education were understood as spaces for forging new foundations for socio-political orders (Visvanathan 2000). New individual and collective subjects became capable of working towards change (see chapters by Kumar and by Faye and Kölbel in this volume). Accordingly, numerous universities were established or reformed with the aim of modernization (a term used in the ofcial parlance) geared at societal development. In post-colonial endeavours to shape new societies, numerous universities became platforms for transporting progressive (e.g. socialist) ideas into the felds of knowledge production. University structures had to undergo close scrutiny where they addressed modalities of enhancing academic excellence and/or became more inclusive (Pradhan’s chapter in this volume).
Movements; struggles; and advocacy related to caste, lines of language, social class, and gender, as well as the sheer presence of obviously ‘diferent’ people, have signifcantly contributed to the challenging of the status quo at South Asian universities (see Kumar, this volume, Nambissan and Rao 2012; Subramanian 2019; Gellner et al. 2020). To the present day, societal hierarchies that result in elite attempts to sustain social closure coincide and clash with actions aimed at more equity and social justice at universities across the South Asian subcontinent (see Kumar, this volume, Nambissan and Rao 2012; Subramanian 2019; Gellner et al. 2020). Ongoing negotiations and conficts indicate that social reconfgurations within university spaces are embedded within national social orders, which in turn are increasingly shaped by transnational and global forces. For instance, the international students studying at South Asian universities reconfgure societal constellations by taking on unconventional mobility tracks that open new perspectives on the elite, hierarchies, and reputations against the backdrop of an economically stronger Global South and an ‘ailing’ Global North (see Baumann, this volume).
In this book, universities are seen as the central stage upon which social negotiations take place. Top-down political and economic
measures shape social dynamics within university campuses while encountering ‘local’ action, i.e. reaction and resistance carried out at the individual and collective level. Social reconfgurations are carried out through new modalities of utilizing ‘voice’ through diferent kinds of mobilities, positionings, and mobilizations (Martelli and Garalyté 2019). Te embattled nature of universities comes to light in the internal struggles over valid academic canons and by questioning or struggling to maintain symbolic and social boundaries (Rao 2012; Jefery 2008; Pathania 2018; Subramanian 2019; Christiansen 2020; Garalyté 2020; Martelli 2020; Kuttig in this volume) with general regard towards the power, role, and status of the academic realms in societies (Bhattacharya 2019).
Currently, ‘students’, ‘studying’, ‘universities’, and the entire realm of ‘higher education’ are rapidly growing felds of research in the social sciences. For an excellent overview, especially focussing attention on East and Southeast Asian contexts, see Lipura and Collins (2020). Te authors not only provide an account of the diversity of approaches to academic mobilities but also identify research gaps. One gap is given by a ‘presumed geographical directionality’, with most publications tracing students’ movements towards the ‘West’. In this book, (elite) aspirations and migrations towards Western destinations are discussed in the chapters by Raina and Jodhka, Tieme and Jayadeva, as well as Valentin, but other chapters discuss students’ migrations towards India (Baumann) as well as the Inter-Asian migrations along religious lines (Reetz). Te chapters by Gerharz and Renschler as well as Kumar draw the reader’s attention to internal mobilities, mostly from rural areas to educational centres—another under-researched topic (however, see Gellner and Adhikari 2019; Adhikari and Gellner forthcoming). Tese movements point to yet another research gap: while most literature concentrates on elite migration and production, precarity—in terms of debts, risks, and uncertainties—requires more scholarly attention. Some of this book’s chapters reveal that with the widening of higher education, students and families endowed with less economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital (need to) engage in logics of compromise and complicity ‘when students undertake study opportunities that do not have clear pathways to future careers success’ (Lipura and Collins 2020: 683; see also Faye and Kölbel, this volume).
Tis book maps out the ‘social lives’ (see Pfaf-Czarnecka 2017) of contemporary universities in South Asia while observing the striking mobilities and social openings in the academic realm (along with social diferentiation) and the resulting social reconfgurations. Tese processes can only be captured with a combination of approaches, i.e. through ‘in-depth’ empirical research ‘on the ground’, the deployment of translocal and transnational research methodologies, and the adoption of a global analytical perspective while engaging in comparison and abstraction.
Scholars have already engaged in interdisciplinary cooperation on these topics, but little attention has been dedicated to what can be gained through multidisciplinary perspectives. Tis book goes beyond eforts undertaken so far: frst, it brings together a broad range of scholars interested in the analysis of past and current dynamics within universities with goals to understand large-scale developments witnessed by contemporary societies and the expansion of our base of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries. Second, this book combines national and international perspectives with close observations at the micro-level of university premises. For instance, it takes up the important question formulated by Raghuram: ‘What forms of embodied knowledge do students bring when they travel and how are these selectively incorporated or dismissed by educational institutions?’ (2013: 149). Bringing the diferent constellations and scales together in one volume allows for the comparison of similar processes taking place in diferent parts of South Asia. Only too ofen, localized perspectives ignore comparative approaches as well as the necessity for contextualization beyond local or national settings. Tird, this book’s contributions draw on post-colonial approaches, highlighting educational disparities and power asymmetries originating from the colonial past, and foreground the ways in which global challenges demanding necessary adjustments of universities are mirrored in various South Asian countries. In doing so, it calls attention to a region that has, so far, been less visible in active debates about the changing nature of university education.
Conceptually, we ground the book in two debates: mobilities and mobilizations.
Mobilities
Te expansion of higher education goes hand in hand with increased levels of student mobilities. Long a relatively under-researched feld, student mobilities have increasingly drawn attention, in the last few years, to diverse transnational, regional, and national contexts (e.g. Rizvi 2011; Brooks and Waters 2011; Findlay 2011; Collins and Ho 2018; Lipura and Collins 2020; Pfaf-Czarnecka 2020; Waters and Brooks 2021). In comprehensive contributions on the topic, Findlay et al. (2012), Raghuram (2013), and King and Raghuram (2013) have identifed and analysed student mobility via the following modalities: demographically (King 2012); institutionally, by examining the internationalization of higher education and its role in student mobility (e.g. Sidhu 2002); and the relevance of access to cultural, human, and/or social capital for students abroad (Baláz and Williams 2004; Waters 2006, 2009). Other researchers have been concerned with how certain countries and institutions of higher education are perceived and how such perceptions infuence young people’s decisions to study abroad (Madge et al. 2009; Beech 2014; Valentin 2015; Kölbel 2020b; Phan 2016; Yang 2018). Tey also show how such projections of national or institutional identity can sustain unequal relationships of power—between, both, countries and regions (Marginson and van der Wende 2007; Altbach 1989; Altbach and Knight 2007) as well as within societies (Waters 2006; Xiang and Shen 2009).
Te ‘mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry 2006; Hannam et al. 2006) has called attention to a conception of the world in terms of multiscalar mobile relations, fows, and circulations. Mobilities research explores social and material practices and the complex interconnections between the movements of people, objects, information, and resources. Recent contributions to mobilities research have also foregrounded the politics of mobilities—the uneven and ofen unstable power constellations that shape and are shaped by the interactions among spatially dispersed actors and places (Cresswell 2010; Sheller 2018; Sheller and Urry 2006). Tis view builds upon the ‘power geometry of time-space compression’ conceived by Massey (1993), which refers to the distinct ways in which social groups and individuals are placed in relation to fows and interconnections.
Concerns have been raised over a binary distinction between mobility and immobility. Mobilities research, especially, emphasizes the interdependencies of mobilities and immobilities or ‘mobilities and moorings’ (Urry 2007). Above all, it is the recognition of immobile material worlds and fxities of spatial infrastructures and institutional moorings—such as roads, airports, and communication technologies as well as forms and documents—that enable mobilities (Bissell and Fuller 2011).
Questions about how fxities work, how they are socially embedded, and how they enable mobilities have become important in studies on ‘migration infrastructures’ (Xiang and Lindquist 2014; Tieme 2017; Weiqiang et al. 2017). Existing studies conducted in South Asia have so far predominately dealt with migration infrastructures in the context of international labour migration (Kern and Müller-Böker 2015; Uprety 2020). In this volume, Jayadeva and Tieme, however, show that newly emerging connections in the form of online social media and educational consultants also play a signifcant role for students from Nepal and India to navigate the international education market and go abroad for their university education. In calling attention to increasingly complex immigration regulations, admission procedures, and exchanges through social media and educational marketing campaigns, Jayadeva’s and Tieme’s research makes evident that the power constellations shaping exchanges between diferent actors and components in international higher education are constantly shifing, yet without necessarily prompting changes to the existing social class structure. Massey (1993) emphasizes that it is not enough for scholars to distinguish between those who move and those who do not move. Instead, it is important to recognize that some social groups and individuals are better able to initiate and control mobility than others and that practices of mobility can reproduce existing inequalities and even lead to new forms of social diferentiation (see also Kaufmann et al. 2000; Cresswell 2006). In this sense, mobility cannot be equated with freedom only because it also brings aspects of new confnements and modes of exploitation found in, e.g. uncertain residency status, restrictions on settlements and civil rights, forced migration, or deportation (Salazar and Smart 2011; Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013). Te chapters comprised in this volume reveal a range of social disparities, shifing between the educational chances among the elites as well as among those lacking most capital forms.
Social capital can likewise be a kind of ‘mooring’, e.g. when families choose to support family members to go abroad ofen in the hope that they will send remittances later on. In general, social capital depends on mutual relationships and the returning of favours where moorings, in terms of membership traits such as allegiance and loyalty, provide security even as the world keeps accelerating. Terefore, what is immobile is not only the ‘immobile material worlds’ but can also encompass personal relationships. For internationally mobile students, maintaining but also building networks during a stay in another country through the internet and social media, short-term visits, and musings about a future life back home has been found to be crucial for having the ability to fnally return (Tieme 2014; Waters 2009). Based on research with Nepalis who attained their university education in Denmark, Valentin’s chapter in this volume shows how internationally mobile students strategically position themselves within transnational networks. Te social ties that Nepalis, living in the diaspora, maintain with their home country allow them to pursue political and entrepreneurial ventures and, by extension, to retain power and infuence in Nepali society.
Research also increasingly provides a better understanding of the meanings, representations, and discourses that frame mobilities (Hannam et al. 2006; Urry 2007; Cresswell 2010). Mobility and overseas education, more specifcally, are commonly seen as social goods and ultimate goals, whereas forms of immobility, fxity, or groundedness acquire connotations of passiveness, failure, and backwardness to an increasing extent (Cresswell 2006). In her chapter, Pradhan reminds us that such dominant associations attached to spatial mobility and immobility existed long before international student mobility became a global phenomenon. Pradhan’s analysis of Nepal’s frst education policy illustrates well that spatial mobility and related conceptions of ‘elsewhere’ were seen as central means to knowledge acquisition and modernity. In this way, ideas connected with distant places become intertwined with local political projects and continue to shape developments in Nepal’s national higher education system to date.
It is important to note that recent literature contains diferent connotations of mobilities and is increasingly critical of binaries with regard to mobilities, such as the diferentiation between ‘elite, corporate expatriates’ or ‘poor, precariously living labour migrants’. Such a distinction
bears the risk of ignoring a large proportion of migrants who have a ‘middling status position’ and who occupy a middle-class position in their country of origin (Landolt and Tieme 2018). Tese migrants have received little attention so far, as scholars of student migration currently place more emphasis on international students’ movements.
Trough the conceptual lens of ‘portals of globalisation’, Baumann shows how universities, such as Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in India, have become important players in shaping student mobilities, what was formerly and solely the role of the state. Reetz’s chapter also brings to light the scope of academic student migrations to and within Asia. His chapter combines insights into students’ mobilities as well as their mobilizations, showing how students’ confrontations on campuses enhance their refexivity on their places in the world. Te chapters by Renschler and Gerharz as well as the chapter by Kumar highlight the magnitude and complexities of internal student migrations within South Asian countries. Renschler and Gerharz show how students coming from non-academic backgrounds do not only construct translocal social spaces through rearranging their relationships with people located in diferent places. Students also experience ethnic and religious diferences on the university campus itself, providing new sources of inspiration and the need to reposition themselves in relation to the diferent social and spatial constellations within which they engage.
Power constellations are represented in global rankings and academic hierarchy cultivating the perception of a division of global higher education into an ‘academic West’ and an ‘academic rest’ (Baumann 2017: 196). Te bulk of universities in the Global South are not only absent among the top-ranked universities (presently, the most notable exceptions exist in East and Southeast Asia); they are also under-represented in academic research. Available studies tellingly illustrate the everyday experiences of student migrants and the strategies adopted by educational institutions and national policymakers in response to enhanced levels of student mobility. However, they remain, by and large, focussed on major ‘sending’ (e.g. China, South Korea, Singapore, Japan, and India) and ‘receiving’ countries (e.g. North America, Europe, and Australia). Little efort has been made to adopt a post-colonial perspective in order to scrutinize geographical conceptions connected with implied global hierarchies in higher education (see Baumann 2017; Kerner 2012; Castro Varela and Dhawan 2015; Madge et al. 2009; Kölbel 2020b).
Tis volume not only adopts a new, regional perspective (so far, only Martelli and Garalyté 2019 comprise chapters based on research in several South Asian countries); it also contributes to our understanding of the connectivity and embeddedness of South Asian universities within global higher education. Several chapters in this volume, specifcally those by Reetz and Baumann, show that the fows from East to West are progressively reversing (see also Pfaf-Czarnecka 2020). India, especially, while continuing to be a major ‘sending country’, receives a growing number of foreign students coming from diverse South and Southeast Asian countries along with select African and Arab places of origin, as documented in recent UNESCO statistics. Te texts presented here demonstrate the power of post-colonial constellations in the feld of higher education (see Raghuram et al. 2014) while showing that student mobilities are increasingly moving away from established routes towards the West. Tis also refects a certain change in perceptions of educational hierarchies—which is, however, only at an early stage.
Te contributions to this volume share several recurring themes: the power represented in rankings and hierarchies, the efects of power on what is researched and what is not, post-colonial debates and critiques of Eurocentrism, and the relationship between mobilities and immobilities, examined within the framework of striking spatial and social inequalities. Tis volume is in line with a further aspiration of the mobility paradigm: to overcome the limitations of ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002)—where the focus lies on sedentary methodologies, static frameworks of scale, and a fundamental preoccupation with the transgressions of national borders (Greiner and Sakdapolrak 2013; Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002). Our contributions are concerned with local contexts and mobile actors’ situatedness within their academic institutions. Regional and internal mobilities have been ofen neglected in research, although globally, they constitute the biggest share of human mobilities; similarly, international and internal migration are ofen connected (Greiner and Sakdapolrak 2013; Tieme 2008).
How students are simultaneously involved in practices of both mobility and immobility is also apparent in the use of Facebook and Twitter (Loader et al. 2014; Kuttig in this volume). Tey also use social media to communicate about opportunities to study abroad and share recommendations on the best educational consultants (Beech 2015; Kölbel
2020b; Jayadeva and Tieme in this volume). International students use the internet and social media to exchange knowledge and experiences pertaining to their places of origin as well as the new places in which they are studying. To this end, the analyses presented here shed new light on the (re)production of hierarchies based on the ways we move and the meanings given to these movements. We must thereby situate the mobility of knowledge not only geographically but in relation to more individual contexts (such as diferent life courses) and structural contexts (such as labour market conditions and employability), where structures for taking up opportunities or responding to risks continue to be highly unevenly distributed for young adults in diferent global contexts (Hoerschelmann 2011: 380).
Mobilizations
Te volume at hand engages with the intricate interconnections between movements and mobilizations, be it collective mobilizations on political grounds or individual positional changes in the quest for social mobility through education. Several chapters—notably those by Reetz, Kumar, Kuttig, Faye and Kölbel, and Valentin—explore how and when individual and collective movements instigate student mobilizations and to what ends. Here, it is understood that movements and ‘moorings’, mobilizing, and confict are ofentimes closely intertwined. In any given student body, social negotiations can transform into frictions (Tsing 2005), i.e. confictive social student interactions can create new possibilities; they can infuence policies, contribute to change in value systems, and generally enhance civic awareness (see the collection by Martelli and Garalyté 2019). Established narratives about student mobilizations range from students being depicted as highly politicized (Martelli 2020; Martelli and Parkar 2018) to a decry of students’ growing apathy (critically, see Teltumbde 2019). Yet, few researchers have, thus far, begun to scrutinize dominant depictions of student politicization and student movements in South Asia and elsewhere (Hazary 1987; Gupta 2019; Snellinger 2018; Pathania 2018, and especially Martelli and Garalyté 2019).
Te ‘global students manifesto’1 demonstrates the salience of students’ (self-)refexivity as well as the scope of student organizations on the university, disciplinary, national, regional, and global levels. Civic/democratic education is increasingly considered an important part of being a student and an obligation that the undertaking of academic studies entails (Levin and Greenwood 2016; Deshpande 2016). Te notion of going to university has always been conceptualized in relation to the world of knowledge acquisition in specifc spaces, such as the classroom or the library. But recent events occurring on the campuses of various South Asian universities and beyond have brought to light that important aspects of social learning take place outside the classroom. Subsequently, mobilization based on social learning can have repercussions for curriculum development, faculty composition, and the ever-contested modalities of teaching.
In order to develop an understanding of universities as social spaces, it is important to account for external interventions—be it political or civic actors—and to extend the boundaries of university education beyond the institutional setup. In this volume, Faye and Kölbel do so by attending to processes of learning which take place when students are absent from campus. In Kathmandu, youth organizations ofen brought together a diverse group of university students and helped them to acquire the competencies and contacts needed to forge a professional career in the highly competitive modern labour market. Valentin’s study of Nepalis studying and working in Denmark furthermore shows that connections between universities and external interventions—be it political or civic actors— not only extend beyond the institutional setting of the campus but may, in fact, span national borders. Universities as social spaces, therefore, provide a particularly good vantage point from which to explore the relationship between spatial mobilities and political mobilizations.
South Asia provides numerous examples of politicization of student bodies along and outside the lines of party politics (Snellinger 2018; Gupta 2019; Koskimaki 2020). Many young people in India, Bangladesh, and Nepal see higher education as an avenue for entering politics (Martelli and Garalyté 2019); universities ofen serve as natural grounds for recruiting members and followers by all major political parties. In this volume, Kuttig discusses the various channels and motifs around which
1 See: http://iusy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/EN-Students-Manifesto.pdf.
university students in Bangladesh are mobilized for party politics. His fndings show that Bangladeshi state universities have become conducive for ‘contagious politics’ to develop, where student wings of the big political parties engage in violent action (see also Kabir and Greenwood 2017). Te interruptions caused by such protests can also be a disturbance for numerous other students.
At the same time, the analyses presented in the chapters by Kumar as well as by Faye and Kölbel remind us that student politicization also takes place outside the realm of party politics, sometimes even positioning itself against party politics. Recent political movements in many parts of the world—such as the ‘Arab Spring’—have brought new modalities of democratic participation and expression to light (see Kumar’s chapter). Distant role models provide resources for struggling over symbolic recognition and over such ‘mundane’ goals as realizing the rights to student accommodation and freedom of movement on university campuses. Read together, these analyses of the changing nature of student politics and various forms of student mobilizations help to identify and unpack the power regimes in which universities are enmeshed.
Diference, in/equality, and transformation of university spaces
Te balancing of neoliberal pressures and the norm of equality has sparked diferent dynamics in the realm of higher education. In important respects, neoliberal dictations create unequal efects between and within universities. Global inequalities between countries of the global North and South represent divides between former colonial powers and occupied countries (Baumann 2017). Resource divisions, e.g. show up in the distribution of researchers across the world where, e.g. low-income countries average only 66 researchers per 1 million inhabitants—50 times fewer than OECD countries (UNESCO 2015). All low-income countries, combined, account for as little as 0.3% of global research spending (Messerli et al. 2019). Te combination of low researcher density and limited access to established research communities and journals seriously hinders low-income countries in their academic development and
continues to drive many talented young students from the global South to study abroad (Trechsel et al. 2020).
Since the global machinery of measuring and ranking universities has been put in motion (Shore and Wright 1999), most university authorities aspire to move upward in the implied global hierarchies of higher education (Ishikawa 2009), their eforts initially determined by economic pressures (Münch 2011; Komljenovic and Robertson 2016).2 Te quest for prestige, infuence, and wealth has resulted in self-reinforcing efects: more scholars and students seek to move to places that rank particularly high. Positional competition, buttressed by credentialist orientations (Jongyoung 2011), causes students to contribute to the wealth of elite universities, most of which have been raising tuition fees considerably over the last decades. Te pronounced elite reproduction via higher education has not been (signifcantly) reduced by the availability of scholarships, as many of the most renowned foundations privilege students already displaying cultural capital—that is usually acquired through a privileged upbringing (Pásztor 2015; Bäumer 2017).
At the same time, the norm of equality increasingly informs university reforms. In this vein, enhancing diversity and reducing social disparities in the realm of higher education has become a goal endorsed by many universities around the globe, including in South Asia. Tat more and more people participate in higher education and that it has opened doors to growing numbers of students are facts reported by most regions of the world. Tese trends point to a number of issues: frst, they reveal the highly unequal nature of higher education that existed in the past and the ways in which past inequalities have provided the foundations for present-day unequal constellations in the academic realm. Second, although more and more ‘non-traditional’ (see Archer et al. 2001) students are able to enrol in universities, institutional barriers may prevent them from successfully completing academic studies because powerful, symbolic, and social divisions continue to be at work (Rao 2012; Henry and Ferry 2017).
Te problems students encounter during the course of their studies have not been given sufcient attention in the South Asian context so far;
2 Post-colonial constellations tend to reinforce Western predominance, but indications of a de-centring of the academic feld can also be observed (Madge et al. 2014).
the bulk of research concentrates on the ‘passage’ (transition) to university and the graduates’ chances in the labour market (see e.g. Jefrey et al. 2008). By examining how students from social groups previously not represented at university approach and experience higher education, the chapter by Faye and Kölbel calls attention to the very process of university study, the ways in which inequalities work in the academic feld, and the students’ attempts to tackle such inequalities.
Tird, new forms of discrimination can come into existence. Outside of the South Asian context, research has revealed that categories such as ‘international students’ can become problem categories in the university discourse (Iverson 2012), i.e. seen in collective terms as those lacking expertise (cultural knowledge, skills for learning) and requiring special support. Administrative measures aimed at improving the prospects of ‘non-traditional’ students may result in their being ‘othered’, i.e. treated as an entity separate from ‘mainstream students’ (Iverson 2012). Tis was widely observed at Western universities and it does apply in South Asian contexts where ‘quota students’ are met with pejorative attributions (for India, Rao 2012; for Nepal, Pfaf-Czarnecka 2019). Te fgure of the ‘international student’ may be absent in the South Asian perception, for the most part, but there is a growing number of students from abroad, especially at universities in India (Baumann in this volume) and Pakistan (Reetz in this volume).
Te key categories of social inequality, ‘race’/‘ethnicity’, ‘gender’, and ‘class’, continue to constitute the main dimensions of disadvantage in higher education in South Asia and beyond. It is crucial, though, to disentangle these categories from one another. Te dimension ‘gender’ works diferently in courses of study attended predominantly by female students, e.g. humanities, compared to those attended mostly by male students, e.g. informatics (Losch 2017). Gender plays diferent roles on diferent academic stages and has a heavy importance in everyday leisure activities, academic networking, and while grappling with work–life balance. As mobilization at US–American Ivy League universities has revealed, ‘race’ has remained the key dimension of discrimination, afecting diferent groups of students in diferent ways. ‘Minority’ students, in particular, lack role models among the teaching staf as faculties continue to be predominantly white with ‘Asian’ academic teachers (ofen originating from India) coming in second. Little research has
been dedicated to the intersections of race, gender, and class (but see Chua et al. 2016).
Although numerous students in disadvantaged positions have found ways to and through universities, recent research suggests that these new openings for ‘non-traditional’ students are ofen accompanied by closures (see Naudet 2018 in India and Kölbel 2020a on Nepal). While more and more people participate in higher education, only a few of those from ‘low’ social classes manage to become academic teachers, let alone professors (Subramanian 2019; Pfaf-Czarnecka forthcoming). Tose of modest economic means who manage to study at elite universities are likely to end up with considerable debt (Pásztor 2015). Established lines of discrimination, as well as resentment, can continue within university premises (Kumar 2016). Terefore, it is important to assess a number of pending questions: when and how do individual attempts to climb the social ladder prove successful? How, by whom, and by what means are these attempts for upward mobility contested or restricted during the academic study course? What is the price of moving upward?
Spatial dimensions that materialize in the physical shapes of campuses and in the mechanisms of closures and distances enacted there are likely to reinforce inequalities. Recent research carried out by social and cultural geographers as well as sociologists, anthropologists, and educational scientists indicates that campuses can become internally contested locations, shaping social relationships between students (Brooks et al. 2015; Kölbel 2013; on the relevance of a spatial lens for education, in general, see Robertson 2010). Tese new fndings have demonstrated that student experiences may be spatially diferent and that processes of spatial distancing may go along with processes of social diferentiation. Tis holds true for individual universities’ locations in larger socio-spatial settings and for the internal organization of space within the confnes of a campus. Physical premises can thus co-produce forms of inclusion and exclusion (see Hopkins 2010; Turner and Manderson 2007). For instance, Andersson et al. (2012), as well as Hopkins (2011), have shown how spatial boundaries within university premises work to the disadvantage of some categories of women, Muslims, and other ‘non-traditional’ students (see also Brooks et al. 2015). Caste rivalries between students over the use of campus space are illustrative in an Indian context. Jefrey (2008: 530–532) explains how middle-class students at a university in the
state of Meerut came up with spatial strategies that aimed successfully at excluding Dalit students from establishing themselves within the university. For instance, they secured more hostel rooms for their ‘peers’ from the same class and caste background by taking them away from Dalit students. Tey also policed and marked campus areas as their own by making daily motorcycle rounds (see also Kuttig, this volume). Another illustration of caste boundaries is students’ use of ‘derogatory anecdotes’ in which their lower-caste colleagues are depicted as inherently backward and not made for learning (Deuchar 2014: 147).3 In this vein, the legitimacy of their existence/dwelling in the university space is repeatedly questioned.
Temporal dimensions of university study can also reinforce inequalities. Te concept of ‘university parcours’ (Pfaf-Czarnecka and Prekodravac 2017) aptly captures the dynamic nature of the university experience and the power of boundaries at work during a university course. In this approach, the process of studying at university is seen as an interplay between the passage through formal changeovers (e.g. exams), interactions (e.g. students and teachers), and ‘Vergemeinschafung’ (especially among ‘peers’). Te concept of ‘parcours’ enquires into individual learning processes and individual students’ entanglements with other personas acting within the academic environment. A university study course is a thoroughly social experience: for instance, the individual’s learning progress is assessed, measured, and compared with that of fellow students. Students observe each other and assess (more or less consciously) who is moving ahead and who is falling behind. Academic teacher–student interactions may have enabling or constraining efects; they can open new horizons and aspirations or discourage them. Peer constellations may prove vital in forging and questioning symbolic boundaries.
3 Two telling examples are provided by Subramanian (2019: 239): ‘. . . in 2009, just afer the announcement of Mandal II. At the time, a joke circulated on the Internet. It went something like this: “India decides to send a space exploration team to the moon. Feverish negotiations begin immediately on the composition of the team, and afer much haggling it is decided to include nine OBCs, six SCs, three STs, and, if there is any place lef, two astronauts’.
‘A second joke circulated afer Prime Minister Modi’s September 2015 visit to the United States. “Narendra Modi during his visit to America said to Obama, ‘Yours is the strongest and most developed country in the world. What is the secret of your country’s success?’ Obama immediately said, ‘Indians’. Modi was totally surprised by Obama’s answer and asked, ‘How?’ Obama replied: ‘You take Reserved Candidates whereas we take Deserved Candidates’.
Tey are prone to contentions; student activism evolves along diferent lines of political and/or social ambitions (see Martelli and Garalyté 2019).
An important avenue for analysing student navigations and trajectories is to give attention to the multiple temporalities and diverse forms of time management at work, or as Tsing (2015) puts it, to the ‘polyphony of time’. Trough their own specifc schedules, universities prescribe a unifed and coordinated time. Tey also epitomize a specifc neoliberal conception of time that reinforces and rewards progress and speed (completing one’s studies as soon as possible). Nowadays, speed translates into a celebration of self-sufciency and self-improvement. Students are given the ‘liberty’ to choose their curricula, confronting them with a responsibility for ‘self-development’ that may be cumbersome.4 Te intertwining of time and self-management carries the danger that those students who may, for various reasons, fail to comply with this ideal are deemed responsible for their own failures. In addition, next to this unifed and coordinated time, there are other temporalities and rhythms that structure the lives of students. Evening parties may be seen as interruptions from prescribed schedules. Tere are also times for relaxation or times for individual study, just to name a few. Generally, students ofen struggle with the pressures of time as they try to bring together their diverse obligations. Of course, students may also perceive the time spent at university as an opportunity for immersion in student and campus life or for exploration of diferent interests or needs.
University as organization and as social space
Te texts collected in this volume document how universities are embedded within the larger frameworks of societies, and they simultaneously show how ongoing interrogations and transformations taking place within university premises afect societal dynamics. Universities are (mainly) based in a particular place and their locations are clearly marked, enabling identity-building (Baumann 2017; Marginson 2011). At the same time, it becomes difcult to conceive of universities as
4 https:// www.acade mia.edu/ 10591 633/ CHALLENGES_
bounded entities. University campuses may be enclosed by physical walls, but their institutional and social boundaries are porous and hard to delineate (see the chapters by Kuttig, Reetz, and Valentin, and see Visvanathan 2020). Temple (2014) decodes the physicality of university campuses historically. Te shape of campuses responds to particular politico-historical moments and to sponsors’ ideals, while meanings change over time. Tus, a close engagement with the campus as a spatial form can yield important insights: ‘a close reading of spatial form can provide insights into the function, and that function evolves partly in response to societal pressures, looking at spatial form can, by implication, provide some insights into changing societal pressures’ (see the chapters by Kuttig, Reetz, and Valentin, and see Visvanathan 2020).
Organigrams represent the boundedness of universities, but they ‘reach out’ in manifold ways. Research networks are as ubiquitous as the connections forged through long, complex chains that channel students into universities (see the chapters by Faye and Kölbel, Jayadeva and Tieme) and as students’ personal and institutionalized ties. Te former consists of agencies that provide information, skills, and support; the latter consists of interpersonal ties as well as channels organizing students, for instance, along political party lines (Kuttig, this volume). Universities are thoroughly interconnected with educational ministries, policymakers, funding bodies, and teaching and research partners, as well as a myriad of other institutions, including building contractors and public–private partnerships. Similarly, students and teachers connect the social spaces of universities with the private realms in which they dwell together with peers and partners; they also forge institutional ties through specifc interactions (e.g. Kölbel 2020a).
Tere are also internal complexities at work. As organizations, contemporary universities fall under the spheres of knowledge production as well as education. Te ‘double existence’ (Huber 2012) of universities opens them up to all social felds interested in making use of the knowledge (including politics and economics) produced at universities. Universities have established internal ‘normalities’ in the sense of creating everyday routines enabling research, teaching, and learning. At the same time, academic knowledge production thrives on the constant (goal of) transgression of epistemic orders (Waldenfels 2009). It is highly dynamic because its generation is impossible without transgression (see also Visvanathan
2020). It consists of questioning the established knowledge reservoirs, the ‘epistemic authority’, and the existing rules and methods. It thrives on scrutinization of established boundaries. In this vein, universities are spaces of cross-examinations, impatience, and opposition (Mecheril and Klingler 2010).
Te ongoing reconfgurations in the felds of knowledge production and dissemination are mirrored in the social dynamics within the academic premises. While the established cannons of academic knowledge may be used to strengthen the social status quo (Subramanian 2019), ‘implicit’ knowledge is mobilized throughout the everyday life of the university in order to address such issues as the (human) right to tertiary education, ‘social inclusion’, and social justice.
Besides knowledge production, universities engage in educating students (and also, increasingly, in their ‘grooming’). Academic teaching involves not only the dissemination of knowledge but also a refection on the modalities of its transmission that are being infuenced and infuencing the understanding of education in a given society. Because many perceive education to be a means of forging national subjects (see e.g. Basu 2015; Sarkar 2002), the modalities and contents of education are perennially contested. While combining research and teaching, universities are open to very pronounced and diverse expectations and pressures.
Tis book concentrates on students, tracing their pathways, positionalities, grievances, and (collective) actions, asking how these aspects shape reconfgurations of the social. Te chapters document that students’ ‘existence’ within the university realm evolves in relation to other ‘stakeholders’ and takes place within regimes of power. As diferent forces afect students throughout their courses of study, individual pathways through universities respond to diferent external expectations and self-referential logics of action responding to the manifold, partially conficting forces at work. Te examination of these processes leads us to a more thorough preoccupation with the social spaces of universities than that which has taken place so far.
Te social-spatial constellations within the confnes of university campuses come to light when tracing the contestations over access to students’ dormitories (see the chapters by Kumar and Kuttig in this volume) and the modalities of dwelling in them (Renschler and Gerharz, this volume). Preoccupations with the quality of university spaces can be discerned
while understanding students’ rationalities in selecting universities and in engaging with specifc teaching subjects (see chapters by Reetz and by Raina and Jodhka in this volume). University spaces are also targets of external interventions when designing national plans of action (Pradhan, this volume) or when civil society actors seek to infuence the modalities of societal learning and teaching (Valentin, this volume). In sum: because universities are socially embedded, the confnes of universities are necessarily porous, whereas organigrams and physical walls insist upon social closure. Tis paradox is refected in this collection.
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