8. Applying The Coloniality Lens To International Collaboration In Higher Education
Nora Engel, Maastricht University; Anja Krumeich, Maastricht University
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês
Coloniality of power has entered higher education with universities aiming to decolonize their curricula to challenge colonial epistemic structures. Recent years have also seen a trend to foster collaboration and exchange between higher education institutions, especially between the global south and north. Concurrently, higher education has undergone enormous shifts towards hybrid and online forms of education, enabled by communication technologies and widespread availability of broadband internet. This development has been accelerated by COVID-19 and the increasing international orientation of universities that aim to internationalize their student body and curricula.
STS has long engaged with postcolonial technoscience and also problematized its own bias towards high-income countries. The above-mentioned developments in practice and policy and emerging attempts at challenging long-lasting power relations in living and learning/teaching together deserve scrutiny and offer analytical scope for STS.
This panel seeks to explore how coloniality is manifest, reproduced or subverted in international higher education collaboration and exchange and with what effect. How do increasing sensitivity to coloniality, collaboration and exchange, and technology-enabled online formats reconfigure existing relations against the historical backdrop of inequity? Where do the global north and its institutions continue to wield power?
We invite papers that examine this nexus for instance in teaching and collaboration; in institutions, class rooms, planning, curriculum design, existing infrastructure such as scholarships, accreditation processes, administrative practices; in the role of technologies or how capacity building is organized. Papers could also examine formats of teaching STS and how they are being adapted to the developments outlined above.
