Andrew G. Gibson

This special issue is the result of three years of conversations and scholarly exchange, emerging from the Alternative Internationalisms working group of the ‘European Universities – Critical Futures’ project. This project, led by Professor Susan Wright and funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark, allowed for the development of a network of seventeen European research centres, including both senior and early stage researchers, with the stated objective ‘to rethink the role of European universities in a context of political, social and geopolitical upheaval’ (European Universities – Critical Futures n.d.). The internationalisation of higher education is a necessary area for exploration in any rethinking of what European universities can and should be, and so this was one of the foci of the project through a working group of researchers and academics in different parts of the world. ‘Rethinking’ as the overarching aim of the ‘European Universities – Critical Futures’ project allowed not just for an open and curious approach to internationalisation, however, but for stepping back to consider just what ‘the international’ means for those involved in higher education.

The concept of ‘centre and periphery’ has become ubiquitous in the study of higher education, especially in an international context. Through an engagement with the recent scholarly literature, we argue that simultaneously this concept has been decontextualised and naturalised. Its origins were largely forgotten and centre and periphery started to be descriptive of ‘the way the world is’. This article argues for the de-naturalisation of this concept, through an exploration of its genealogy, and a critical analysis of the role concepts play in any theoretically grounded engagement with reality. To achieve that, we develop a heuristic of the critical cycle and we show alternative and powerful ways to engage with the concept ‘centre and periphery’. We argue that critique of the concept should lead to alternative projects for higher education.

Since the publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire has been important for disseminating the concept of dialogue in education. Dialogue is often framed as the kind of interaction that educators should enact in their practice, to right historical and socio-political wrongs. With this, speaking and assuming one’s voice has a special place in education, but this paper argues for the significance of listening for any conceptualisation of dialogue. Starting with a description of an event that Freire described as the ‘clearest and most bruising lesson’ of his life as an educator, this paper undertakes a phenomenology of the error leading to his development of dialogue as an educational praxis. From this the paper addresses the question ‘how do we learn when we are wrong?,’ and argues against an exclusively epistemological perspective on dialogue and ‘being wrong’ in favour of an ontological framing of dialogue and ‘being in error’.

Discussions about the role of universities have long been framed in terms of questions of what is good for the public, as well as how and whether higher education serves that good. Today, the language of ‘societal impact’ has become an accepted way for policymakers to frame the matter, but just who is included in the underlying definition of society that this formulation presupposes? In this paper, we consider how ‘society’ has been constructed in discussions of the societal impact of humanities research in Denmark, through an engagement with legislation, national political commentary, and institutional policy. We draw on the work of Martin Heidegger and Simone Weil to analyse, through an ontology of policy approach, the vision of society these policies construct. We conclude with proposals for alternative societies and forms of policy that these philosophers make possible.

This paper argues against the apparently benign concept of ‘academic citizenship,’ drawing on resources and conceptual precedents from within higher education generally and philosophy specifically. It does so not only in order to offer a critique, however. By considering the directions from which criticism can be levelled at the notion of ‘citizenship’, and the State-centric conceptualisation of the university underlying it, an argument for an alternative conceptualisation of academic being is offered. Ontology is suggested as a suitable route to dealing with the urgency of the questions confronting those inhabiting contemporary higher education. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, along with Isabelle Stengers, it proposes a ‘nomad ontology’ as both a form of analysis and possible mode of being for academics.

The border-crossing nature of science is well recognised, and has long been a focus of policy-makers with an interest in governing this space. The international aspect of the humanities is less clearly understood, and the extent to which it has been a focus of policy is similarly not well conceptualised. UNESCO’s efforts in this area provide a useful corpus of texts through which international humanities policy can be explored. Drawing on Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics, this paper considers what UNESCO’s attempts at developing international humanities policy have to say about the ontological status of the humanities, and of policy itself. In setting out an ontology of policy, it generates a concept of ‘world humanities’ as a means of reconstituting the humanities its own specific mode of inquiry and form of knowledge.