Conference Agenda

International student mobility (ISM) has experienced explosive growth over the past 20 years (OECD, 2024). However, recent global disruptions, including the COVID-19 pandemic, wars, and environmental disasters, have reshaped ISM's direction (Glass & Cruz, 2022), moving it towards a multipolar orientation. That is, a wider range of “off-beat” destinations often situated in the Global South, such as China (Gao et al., 2024), Singapore (Yang & Lu, 2025), and South Korea (Wei, 2024), has gained visibility alongside long-dominant “on-beat” destinations predominantly located in the Global North. This draws attention to the dynamics of ISM and the lived experiences of international students in these “off-beat” destinations.

China exemplifies this reconfiguration. Traditionally recognised as a major sending country, China has increasingly positioned itself as an important receiving country for international students (Yang et al., 2025). Through policies promoting outbound mobility and the branding of “Study in China” (MOE, 2024), studies show that the main attractions of international higher education in China are affordability and scholarships, China’s economic growth, institutional reputation, political relationships with home countries, and perceived career opportunity (Gbollie & Gong, 2020;). Among these studies, they tend to treat international students in China as a broad, undifferentiated category, paying limited attention to within-group variation (Yang et al., 2025), for example, how programme type and disciplinary context shape decision-making. This matters because what students seek, and what they evaluate as “value,” can differ substantially across fields and cohorts.

MBA programmes, widely regarded as vehicles for international experiential learning and global mobility (Ryan et al., 2013), serve as a unique and important research context for understanding the aforementioned differences in international students in China. MBA programmes typically recruit students who have a minimum of 3 years of work experience or relevant managerial experience (Dakduk et al., 2016), and are driven by specific career goals, such as improving managerial skills, enhancing career prospects, expanding social prospects and networking, and increasing earning potential (Wilkins et al., 2018). This means the MBA cohort is supposed to be relatively mature, as opposed to fresh graduates, and to have a better sense of what they want and how to go about it, suggesting a distinctive approach to decision-making. Further, MBA programme selections are often shaped by academic merit and the university and/or business school’s reputation (Blackburn, 2011). Yet the global MBA landscape – and much of the research on MBA students – remains centred on the Global North, especially the United States and the UK (QS Top Universities, 2025, September 17; Wilkins et al., 2018). Despite the growing visibility of Chinese business schools in global MBA rankings (QS Top Universities, 2025, September 17), we still know relatively little about why international students choose to pursue an MBA in China, as distinct from studying in China more generally. To address this gap, this paper sheds light on an MBA programme at a top-ranked Chinese university and draws on semi-structured interviews with ten international students whose home countries broadly reflect major sending regions to China - primarily Asia and Africa (Yang et al., 2025). The following question guides this study:

Q1: Why did international students choose to study an MBA programme in China?

1990's reforms in India paved the way for a new shift of social transformation, leading to the internationalisation of educational knowledge via cross-border exchange of ideas. Internationalisation, as an implementation strategy of globalisation, promotes diversity and multiculturalism that fosters a global mindset and harmony through the global flow of learners, meaningful collaborations/partnerships, the setting up of branch campuses, etc. This paper analyses the implementation strategies of the ‘Internationalisation abroad’ branch in India. In the world of linguistic diversity, the cultural capital of a student plays an enormous role in adapting to a foreign culture at university abroad. Entering a higher education institution where the medium of instruction is mostly different from one’s mother tongue in India or abroad, the student faces significant hurdles while climbing the ladder of academic mobility. Drawing on the mobility patterns and experiences of Indian students in Europe, this paper identifies two types of cultural alienation faced by these students: a) the pre-migration disconnects from the Indian Education System and b) the post-arrival sense of detachment emerging from their inability to communicate in the local European language and other barriers. The paper seeks to identify core social stratification variables that impact the process of internationalisation of higher education in India. The fundamental research question around which the paper revolves is ‘How does the pre-migration cultural capital of Indian students shape their preparedness for academic mobility and incorporation of cosmopolitan values required for a multicultural environment'?

Marginson’s (2007) usage of the term ‘global private goods’ for the degrees obtained by international students highlights the commodification of transnational education. The paper attempts to contribute to the sociological and internationalisation literature by exploring the increasing alienation with the knowledge system amidst educational capitalism in a neoliberal era. The theoretical framework analyses academic mobility at the intersection of Alfred Schutz's idea of ‘phantasy at a future time’ (1962) and Edward Said’s concept of Imaginative Geographies (1978). ’ For a nuanced understanding of the discourses of internationalisation in India, the chapter mainly undertakes the works of Simon Marginson, Philip Altbach, NV Varghese, Ying wang, and Hugo Bowles.

This paper examines how quality is governed and assured in international branch campuses (IBCs) operated by UK higher education institutions. As internationalisation reshapes higher education, cross-border provider mobility has expanded rapidly, and IBCs have become a high-profile mode of transnational delivery. The proposal notes that IBCs grew dramatically in the early twenty-first century and that UK institutions operate a leading share of IBCs worldwide, spanning multiple regions including Europe and Asia. At the same time, the complexity and uncertainty inherent in multi-jurisdictional provision intensify risks for students, institutions, and regulators, placing pressure on existing national quality assurance (QA) arrangements. The international and European dimension of the study lies in the governance structure of cross-border provision itself. IBCs are routinely subject to overlapping home- and host-country QA regimes, such that cross-border delivery commonly triggers at least two sets of QA protocols. Yet the proposal highlights that QA mechanisms do not “easily cross international boundaries,” and there is no widely recognized multinational QA regime able to function as a trusted global gatekeeper; regional harmonization and standardization efforts are still developing. This institutional gap makes IBCs a useful site for understanding how quality is negotiated, evidenced, and trusted when regulatory authority is distributed across borders, an issue central to ongoing European and international debates on recognition, comparability, and stakeholder protection in transnational education.

The paper addresses three research questions: how different stakeholders guarantee the quality of IBCs; what problems and challenges exist within the QA system for UK IBCs; and how students, as direct stakeholders and service recipients, perceive and evaluate IBC quality. The objective is to clarify the current QA system and mechanisms for American IBCs, evaluate their effectiveness and constraints, and investigate student perceptions of educational quality and campus experience. Beyond descriptive mapping, the study aims to develop a theoretical model of QA mechanisms for UK IBCs and generate policy-relevant implications for home/host regulators, institutions, and students considering IBC participation.

Conceptually, the study integrates three lenses. Resource Dependence Theory is used to explain how IBCs respond strategically to external constraints and resource environments while attempting to maintain quality standards. Synergy theory supports analysis of how multiple institutional subsystems coordinate to produce “self-organization” for quality maintenance. Organizational culture is employed to interpret how students’ identity, belonging, and campus experience shape perceptions of quality and legitimacy in transnational settings.

This work in progress explores ‘geographies of pedagogies' inherent in present internationalisation practices. Over the past 30 years, higher education has become increasingly internationalised through academic mobility (Tzanakou & Henderson, 2021). Within the EU, policies such as the Bologna process are adopted to make this mobility smooth and it is accompanied by a growing use of English as a medium of instruction (Tange & Jæger, 2021). In this development, the English language has gained prominence as the lingua franca of higher education, and especially policy documents often ignore that knowledge production and teaching are situated practices (Adriansen et al. 2023). Some researchers, however, have addressed this by providing personal narratives of how they as international academics have adapted and developed their teaching in foreign countries (Hosein et al. 2018; Rao et al. 2019), by showing how it varies from one country to another, what counts as a ‘good ’student (Simandan, 2002) and by exploring the situatedness of what it means to be a ‘good’ academic (Adriansen et al., 2015). Yet, there is a lack of research that connects individual narratives to provide a conceptual understanding of these geographies of pedagogy. This paper attempts to fill this gap.

The paper is part of a larger research project exploring how internationalisation affects the perception of quality, relevance and learning in higher education and how these perceptions travel with mobile academics. Based on qualitative interviews with international academics at Danish universities, the aim of this paper is to examine the role of pedagogies in internationalisation of higher education.

The analytical backdrop of the study is ‘geographies of science’ (Livingstone, 2003; Meusburger et al. 2010). By recognising science and academic practices as spatially contingent, geographies of science provides our analytical inspiration for questioning universal claims about pedagogies and teaching practices in higher education. The geographies of science, as articulated by Livingstone (2003) and expanded by Meusburger et al. (2010), help us understand scientific knowledge as fundamentally situated, spatial, and uneven. Rather than treating science as universal and placeless, this perspective highlights how particular sites - laboratories, field stations, classrooms, cities, and transnational networks - shape the questions asked, the methods used, and the authority granted to certain actors. It also draws attention to the circulation of knowledge through the mobility of academics and the spatial asymmetries that privilege some institutions or nations over others. Using geographies of science as analytical inspiration makes it possible to analyse scientific practices including pedagogies as a culturally embedded, materially mediated, and geographically contingent practice.

While the ‘geographies of skills’ have been researched in various contexts lately (e.g. Burzynski et al., 2020; Raghuram, 2021; Richardson, 2019), there is little knowledge about the ‘geographies of pedagogy’ – this means how pedagogical practices and what constitutes good teaching are contextual and spatially situated and how language plays into this.

We use ‘geographies of science’ and ‘geography of skills’ to explore the ‘geographies of pedagogies’ that become visible through the experiences of international academics at Danish universities. We do so by asking the following research questions:

1. How is the delivery of knowledge in higher education shaped by notions of scientific knowledge as universal, and what role does language play in constructing and sustaining these notions of universalism?

2. How are pedagogical practices culturally situated within higher education contexts and how are some practices constructed as universal while others are marked as particular?

By developing the concept of geographies of pedagogies, the paper aims to contribute to ongoing debates on internationalisation, academic mobility, and the situated nature of teaching and learning in higher education.