Universities as Transformative Social Spaces: Mobilities and Mobilizations from South Asian Perspectives

328 Pages·2022·5.925 MB·English

by  Andrea Kolbel, Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, Susan Thieme

Universities as Transformative Social Spaces: Mobilities and Mobilizations from South Asian
Perspectives
Andrea Kolbel (ed.) et al.
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192865571.001.0001
Published: 2022 Online ISBN: 9780191956188 Print ISBN: 9780192865571
FRONT MATTER
Copyright Page 
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192865571.002.0003 Page iv
Published: May 2022
Subject: Sociology of Education
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Endorsements
Tis is a wonderful and timely edited collection, focusing on higher ed-
ucation in South Asia through the lens of student mobilities and mobil-
izations. 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-D irector
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, vi-
sions, critiques, and actions. It allows a thorough understanding of the
‘social lives’ of contemporary universities in South Asia.
— Emeritus Professor Ulrike Müller-B öker, 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 mobiliza-
tion— 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-C hampaign
Universities as Transformative Social Spaces: Mobilities and Mobilizations from South Asian
Perspectives
Andrea Kolbel (ed.) et al.
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192865571.001.0001
Published: 2022 Online ISBN: 9780191956188 Print ISBN: 9780192865571
FRONT MATTER
Acknowledgements 
Published: May 2022
Subject: Sociology of Education
This publication resulted from two academic workshops and a number of exchanges between the authors
whose texts we proudly present. Both workshops were held at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF)
at the Bielefeld University in Germany. The �rst workshop ‘Student Mobilities and Mobilisations in South Asia.
Global Challenges—Local Action’ took place in June 2016 and was funded by the ZiF. The second workshop
‘Global Students: Mapping the Field of University Lives’ was held in December 2017 and was co-founded by the
ZiF, by the Institute of Geography, University of Bern, Switzerland, and by the Institute for World Society,
University Bielefeld. The editors are very grateful for the �nancial assistance, and they would like to thank
the highly e�cient and dedicated sta� at the ZiF: Ms Marina Ho�mann and Ms Trixi Valentin in particular.
The editing process was supported by funds provided by the Universities of Bern and of Bielefeld—that we
would like to acknowledge. Our special thanks go to Ms Astrid Dinter for her secretarial assistance and to Ms
Molly Siler for language editing. We also thank the Oxford University Press for the professional support
throughout the editing process.
p. viii —Andrea Kölbel, Joanna Pfa�-Czarnecka, and Susan Thieme
1
Introduction
Universities as transformative social spaces
Joanna Pfaf- Czarnecka, Susan Tieme, and Andrea Kölbel
Introduction
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 partici-
pating 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 as-
pirations have intensifed so substantially that student debts have become
an important economic factor (Waters 2006, 2009). In view of these de-
velopments, many tensions appear within the social spaces of universities
and have transformative potentials. From the view of students, partici-
pation 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 delin-
eated, 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 par-
allel to each other.
Internationalization ranks high among the strategies embraced by uni-
versities 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: 10.1093/ oso/ 9780192865571.003.0001
2 Universities as Transformative Social Spaces
In 2017, UNESCO (2019) counted over 5.3 million international stu-
dents 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 marketi-
zation 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 stu-
dent 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, univer-
sities 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 stake-
holders. 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 em-
ployment. Tis results in tensions and political mobilizations at univer-
sities. 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
Introduction 3
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 back-
ground, this book demonstrates how current transformations of South
Asian universities and student bodies are intertwined with changes af-
fecting 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) diferen-
tiation 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 pro-
duction that was afected early on by globalizing forces (Reetz’s and
Pradhan’s chapters in this volume). Many key South Asian academic in-
stitutions were established in the colonial era, while important institu-
tions of higher learning such as Taxila (today’s Pakistan) and Nalanda
4 Universities as Transformative Social Spaces
(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 ac-
quisition 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 under-
stood as spaces for forging new foundations for socio- political orders
(Visvanathan 2000). New individual and collective subjects became ca-
pable 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 plat-
forms for transporting progressive (e.g. socialist) ideas into the felds of
knowledge production. University structures had to undergo close scru-
tiny 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 lan-
guage, social class, and gender, as well as the sheer presence of obvi-
ously ‘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 sus-
tain 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 transna-
tional 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 economi-
cally 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
Introduction 5
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 in-
ternal 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 re-
gard towards the power, role, and status of the academic realms in soci-
eties (Bhattacharya 2019).
Currently, ‘students’, ‘studying’, ‘universities’, and the entire realm of
‘higher education’ are rapidly growing felds of research in the social sci-
ences. For an excellent overview, especially focussing attention on East
and Southeast Asian contexts, see Lipura and Collins (2020). Te au-
thors not only provide an account of the diversity of approaches to ac-
ademic 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 chap-
ters 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 cap-
ital (need to) engage in logics of compromise and complicity ‘when stu-
dents 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).
6 Universities as Transformative Social Spaces
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 so-
cial 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 adop-
tion 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 be-
yond 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 develop-
ments 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 observa-
tions 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 insti-
tutions?’ (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 de-
manding 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.