Conference Agenda

In the context of shifting global geopolitics, the landscape of higher education is undergoing a profound transformation from a traditional unipolar structure to a fractured multipolar order. As emerging economies like China rise alongside a simultaneous wave of de-globalization and new nationalism (Huang, 2025; Flint, 2021), higher education has increasingly been constructed as a core arena for inter-state competition. Within this scenario, universities are viewed not merely as academic institutions but as geopolitical instruments for projecting soft power and maximizing strategic advantages (Cantwell, 2021; Hazelkorn, 2017). Consequently, the discourse surrounding international academic mobility has shifted from traditional paradigms of "brain drain" or "talent circulation" to a securitized focus on "research security" and "de-risking" (Lee & Haupt, 2020; Marginson, 2022). This "geopolitical turn" has engendered a complex environment where the logic of scientific openness increasingly clashes with the logic of national security, creating new forms of borders—both physical and ideological—that impede the free flow of knowledge. While existing studies have valuably explored international student mobility under these tensions (e.g., Mok, Shen, & Gu, 2024), there remains a critical gap regarding international scholars. Unlike students, scholars are the primary agents of knowledge production and are thus more deeply entangled in the web of "knowledge security" and state competition.
This research specifically addresses the mobility of non-Chinese foreign scholars to China, investigating how they navigate a "non-traditional" academic destination that is simultaneously a rising scientific powerhouse and a focal point of geopolitical anxiety in the West. We aim to understand the micro-dynamics of scholar mobility against the macro-backdrop of geopolitical reconfiguration by addressing two central inquiries: In an era of intensified geopolitical uncertainty, how is China imagined and experienced as an emerging global academic destination by individual mobile scholars? And how do changing global geopolitics reshape the higher education field at the levels of materiality, imagination, and social practice?
To interpret these dynamics, we adopt a spatial perspective through Lefebvre’s (1991) conceptual lens of the production of space, integrated with Marginson’s (2002; 2022) scales of higher education. We conceptualize the academic environment not as a fixed container, but as a relational space continuously constructed through a triad of dialectically interconnected moments: materiality (spatial practice), imagination (representations of space), and social practice (spaces of representation). Materiality refers to the objective structures that enable or constrain mobility, such as the "Thousand Talents" funding schemes, visa regimes, and the physical infrastructure of research centers. Imagination encompasses the dominant ideologies and discourses, specifically examining how China is "imagined" through conflicting narratives—the Western media's depiction of political risk versus the academic discourse of rising university rankings—and how these representations guide scholars' intentionality. Finally, social practice covers the lived, embodied experiences of scholars, serving as the arena where abstract geopolitical imaginations are grounded, contested, or reinforced through specific research projects and human connections. By employing this framework, we reveal the disjunctures between macro-level geopolitical narratives and micro-level lived realities, arguing that scholars are not passive recipients of policy but active "space makers" who negotiate their professional identities amidst these structural constraints.

Higher Education Research (HER) is a relatively small field of inquiry in which researchers do not readily identify themselves as higher education researchers (Teichler, 2015). Relatively diffuse thematic borders paired with national/local foci have made it challenging to consider HER a ‘unified’ field. Still, researchers like Teichler (2015) or Tight (2018; 2019) have successfully built a case for conducting research with the goal of understanding the field as a whole; showcasing the value of such an endeavor when considering the European and international landscapes.

From these foundational insights, this paper takes as its focus the unequally distributed epistemic representation of global research cultures in the field of higher education studies (Guzmán-Valenzuela & Gómez, 2018), a perspective which remains underdeveloped. Drawing on critiques that the centre periphery model of scientific knowledge production fails to recognise the richness and autonomy of epistemic traditions beyond the Global North (Maginson & Xu, 2023), we examine how Latin American (LA) scholarship is represented within global higher education research – a field which has considerable emancipatory power (Marginson, 2022). LA has a rich tradition of educational research and theorising across its diverse national contexts, with multiple well-developed and emerging strands of scholarship, making it a particularly apposite case for this research (Ordorika & Rodríguez-Gómez, 2018).

A growing body of research has focussed on the region over the past few decades, intending to shine a light on ‘peripheral’ education systems, for example De Wit’s (2005) volume examining the process of internationalisation across seven national LA systems. Such work has been important in placing a focus on a historically overlooked geographical region, and highlighting the diversity and complexity of LA higher education. Despite this scholarly attention on LA as an object of study (e.g. in terms of its development, or its internationalisation), comparatively little attention has been paid to how LA research is situated within the field of global higher education and its associated knowledge structures.

First, we argue that this type of meta research is central to understanding the challenges still persisting in regional HER. With broader research it becomes possible to examine the development of the field, highlighting the opportunities and research gaps that remain. For example, taking research conducted with a European focus (Teichler, 2015), salient issues in the continent refer to: power, market and structures; teaching, learning, evaluation, and diversity; academic development, doctoral education and research; and policy, governance, and HE function within the European landscape. In contrast, the few attempts made in the context of LA have been far less than systematic or encompassing

Looking at Mexico, Argentina, and Brasil, Carengato et al. (2020) posit that the broad research themes in those countries relate to access and inequality, internationalisation and cooperation, and social justice. Another broad effort for examining LA HER shows that research can be organised as focussing on teach(ers/ing) and learn(ers/ing), quality, policy and change, and management, social justice and access (Ordorika & Rodríguez-Gómez, 2018).

In this context, the present research focuses on the epistemic positioning of LA scholarship within global higher education research. Moving beyond treating the region as only an object of study, we examine how research produced in LA is integrated into international knowledge structures. Although these more comprehensive efforts are important, methodologically speaking they lack the robustness and breadth that large-scale quantitative methods allow. Our research questions are therefore:

RQ1: How is LA scholarship represented within global higher education research?

RQ2: Which topics characterise Latin American HER published in international higher education journals?