CIDEC-CIHE Co-Sponsored Seminar
The (Im)possibilities of International Higher Education in Precarious Times

, University of Toronto
252 Bloor St. West.
Room 7-105
Toronto ON M5S1V6
Canada
Declines in government funding for the Canadian postsecondary sector over the past three decades have pushed universities to become heavily dependent on international student enrollment. There is, by now, a significant body of scholarship on the need for ethical, principled approaches to internationalization, in response to the neoliberal and neocolonial orientation of internationalization of higher education. Despite the critiques, the direction of internationalization appears to be unchanged. If the conditions of the global pandemic created an environment of precarity, especially for students venturing to campuses in the Global North, how much more unpredictable, uncertain and precarious are conditions now, amid sudden federal policy changes on international student numbers and visa caps? The impact on higher education itself is everywhere: program closures, faculty and staff lay-offs, hiring freezes, and a general budget crisis in universities and colleges, and an unprecedented rise in anti-immigrant sentiment across Canada. In this talk I first discuss some of the impossibilities of engaging in the internationalization of higher education including the increasing invisibility of international education more generally. Drawing on perspectives from critical internationalization studies, curriculum studies and development studies I then discuss and speculate on possibilities afforded by international education. In particular, I will elaborate on the notion of post-internationalization, arguing for a new commons in international education.
the Speaker

Dr. Kumari Beck
Kumari Beck is Associate Professor, Co-Director for the Centre for Research on International Education, and academic coordinator of the Equity Studies in Education program in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests span internationalization of higher education, international education, curriculum studies, equity issues in education, globalization, decolonial approaches in education, and international development. The courses she teaches reflect diverse and inter-related interests: intercultural and international education, contemporary issues in curriculum, multicultural and anti-racist education, the politics of difference, and teaching for social justice. Her work history includes teaching and program development in international education programs in Canada and abroad, adult community education in the Lower Mainland, and extensive experience in the international development/cooperation sector.