Academic mobility and intercultural encounters

This paper examines the EU-Australia academic mobility as an important contributing aspect of building the Smart, Sustainable and Inclusive European Union.  It focuses on contemporary international encounters and intercultural interactions in academia in the context of an ever growing academic mobility between the EU countries and Australia. The EU–Australia academic mobility is the most visible manifestation of internationalization of education today. Academic mobility is a part of the continuing changes in the teaching and learning processes that academic institutions are undergoing globally. International flows of highly skilled migrants including international students between the EU countries and Australia have been steadily high in the last decades, and research on academic mobility is gaining importance and urgency worldwide. Putting a spotlight on the EU-Australia academic mobility, this paper is interested in identifying optimal conditions and favourable environments for enabling successful intercultural knowledge flows and promoting creative cultures and intercultural connections.

Academic mobility, intercultural encounters and cosmopolitan knowledge creation

In this presentation, I examine contemporary international encounters and intercultural interactions in academia as a researcher and recent participant in the ever-expanding global academic mobility programs. Academic mobility is a part of the modern continuing changes in the teaching and learning processes that higher educational institutions are undergoing globally. These changes are often termed ‘internationalization of education’ and they are expressed in the transformations in both the curricula and recruitment practices of students and staff. Global scale of academic mobility opens up prosperous opportunities for intercultural knowledge interchange, knowledge creation, and knowledge enrichment, all leading to the broadening of cultural imagination and creation of shared cosmopolitan cultural meanings.

Intercultural pathways for knowledge Transfer within academic mobility

This paper focuses on academic mobility with the view of examining knowledge flows and effective cultural pathways for knowledge transfer. Its main objective is to set up the theoretical parameters for exploring intercultural encounters within academic mobility with an additional goal of revealing underlining conditions for effective intercultural knowledge transfer and creation. Academic mobility describes global mobilities of tertiary students and university staff and refers to a growing phenomenon worldwide. It creates additional possibilities for exploring the enabling conditions for the intercultural knowledge flows. Academic migrants have been acknowledged as important agents of intercultural knowledge transfer, interchange and, ultimately, knowledge creation. This paper is guided by a hypothesis that cosmopolitan dispositions can create preconditions for successful knowledge transfer in everyday intercultural interactions in academia. In this paper, theoretical notions and ideas are discussed to provide a foundation for designing an ethnographic research which will seek to analyse empirical manifestations of emerging cosmopolitanism. Some preliminary findings of a pilot study are also analysed.

Locating cosmopolitanism within academic mobility

Intensified academic mobility is an enticing platform for examining the emerging manifestations of cosmopolitanism in expanding intercultural encounters. Cosmopolitanism calls for a dialogue between cultures and for reciprocal appropriation and internalisation of cultures within one’s own culture. This paper endeavours to locate empirical evidence on evolving cosmopolitanism in everyday intercultural interactions and academic experiences. It is guided by the methodological applications of cosmopolitanism and the way cosmopolitanism is redefining the sociological frame of reference. This paper presents discussion and empirical testing of three defining features of cosmopolitanism according to Beck (2002): globality, plurality and civility. Mirroring these guiding principles, this research attempted to identify and analyse cosmopolitan values and dispositions in everyday intercultural encounters, discourses, situations and experiences. This paper presented an argument that cosmopolitan values and dispositions tend to create mutually beneficial conditions for intercultural inclusion and academic mobility provides a fertile ground for their current and future exploration. 

Comparing experiences of academic mobility and migration

Academic mobility and accompanying migration have become increasingly evident as manifestations of globalization and internationalization of education worldwide. This paper aims to provide some insights into intercultural communication in academia by comparing experiences of students and academics who partake in academic mobility or/and academic migration. It seeks to reflect on how differences in cultural patterns impact on the integrational experiences and outcomes of academic learning and everyday interactions. Two contrasting cultural patterns of collectivism and individualism are explored, as they are displayed in intercultural interactions among migrants and hosting societies. To expose this contrast effectively, this paper focuses on the Russian-speaking mobile academics and compares their intercultural experiences in academia of two countries—Italy and Australia. In-depth interviews were conducted with twenty-two academic migrants or/and mobile academics on their experiences, views and perceptions of intercultural integration in two diverse settings. This paper explores diverse aspects of intercultural dialogue and compares perceptions of intercultural integration and feelings of wellbeing. It analyses evolving empirical manifestations of cosmopolitanism in everyday intercultural interactions and argues that postmodern cosmopolitan milieu facilitates intercultural integration and enables knowledge transfer and creation of shared cultural meanings.

Students’ academic, intercultural and personal development in globalised education mobility

A growing number of students around the world are engaged in cross-border study mobility. Their academic, intercultural and personal development is a major concern and responsibility of not only the students themselves and their families but also the host institutions and other actors involved in the education of this cohort. This chapter addresses the pressing need to capitalise on international students’ dual strengths of diverse knowledge and transformative capacity as a meaningful and valuable approach to optimising their personal, intercultural and academic development. It also argues that international students’ learning should be conceptualised from a critical approach that considers how these diverse and intangible dimensions of the mobility landscape affect their learning experience rather than merely locating their learning in cultural, institutional or individual parameters.

Understanding global student mobility: exploring new ways of capturing international experiences using in-county overseas students

Australian universities have large numbers of overseas students who do not engage meaningfully with local students about their international experience. The objective of this research, an initiative that was part of a project funded by Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT), entitled the Global Canopy, was to develop pedagogy to promote local students’ awareness about international study based on an in-country teaching program. The research study aimed to develop new knowledge about how domestic students understand global mobility through interacting with international students enrolled in the same university. The initiative included two workshops that brought together a number of project team members, three overseas students and academic staff mentors, representatives from Deakin Global Student Mobility office, and 31 undergraduate domestic students. Data was collected from a series of in-depth interviews with students involved in the program. Initial findings suggested that the workshops were successful, with 12 undergraduate students enrolled in winter schools in India after completion of the program. The paper concludes with lessons learned from the initiative and calls for exploring new ways of identifying international experiences that can be facilitated within discipline curriculum of the home university.

Migration, unemployment and trade

Migration, Unemployment and Trade focuses on the issues of migration, welfare and unemployment in a trade and development framework. Several chapters of the book analyze the implications of internal labor mobility in a model designed to highlight its implications for regional welfare, urban unemployment, rural-urban dichotomy and structural adjustment. An important innovation in this work is the disaggregation of the economy and the use of separate utility functions to highlight non-homogeneity of preferences. The book also deals with international mobility of factors in different frameworks. In particular it concentrates on the highly emotive issue of legal and illegal migration. Thus this work incorporates interesting and important features of labor economics and factor mobility into trade and distortion theory.