Higher education and social cohesion: Universities, citizenship and spaces of orientation

Healy_Higher education and social cohesion_140515.docx Submitted: 15/05/2015

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Higher education and social cohesion: Universities, citizenship and spaces of orientation Submission Draft Miriam Faine (Monash), Sue Plowright (Monash), Terri Seddon (ACU)

Introduction Universities’ role in nation building and cohesive citizen formation is challenged by globalisation. In Australia, these effects are visible in the growth of international student enrolments that have made education a major ‘export’ industry, and in deep uncertainties that now surround what it means to be a ‘university’, do ‘academic work’, and form cohesive citizenry. There is evidence that marketisation, the restructuring of public enterprises so that they operate on the basis of market choice, has shifted the values and ethics of higher education in Australia, but it is less clear how these developments affect the relation between higher education, citizenship and social cohesion - ‘the willingness of members of a society to cooperate with each other in order to survive and prosper’ (Scanlon Foundation, 2015). In this chapter we use the concept of ‘space of orientation’ to understand the university as a distinctive locale for learning and identity formation. We report on a case study of Monash University, a self-proclaimed ‘global university’, to grasp the space, orientations and effects of changes in higher education policy and practice on social cohesion. On this basis, we argue that universities are changing in ways that compromise familiar forms of national citizenship but they generate spaces and orientations that support distinctive forms of cross-border social cohesion that points towards the possibility of transnational citizenship. Social cohesion and higher education Social cohesion is an ambiguous notion. In the 1970s, Michael Mann argued that both consensus and conflict sociology overstated the idea of ‘cohesion’. In liberal democracies, he suggests, cohesion arises from a ‘lack of consistent commitment to general values’ relying on the ‘“pragmatic acceptance” by subordinate classes of their limited roles in society’ (Mann, 1970: 435). Alongside this kind of social analysis, there are studies of social cohesion as symbolic politics. Such research shows how fears about cohesion are associated with moral panics that run through particular communities. Even sociologists can become ‘prophètes manquès’, when they suggest ‘there has been some fall from grace and that the morality of their times is confused and impoverished’ (Pahl, 1991: 345). Over the last 10 years, incidents that reveal ethnic divisions encourage the sense that social cohesion in multicultural Australia is in decline. Yet episodes of social division, such as the 2005 Cronulla riots and more recent involvement of Australian citizens in Islamist military activities, are countered by evidence of community wide cooperation. For example, the execution in Indonesia on 29 April 2015 of Andrew Chan and Mayuran Sukamaran, prompted a widespread peaceful public outpouring of advocacy and grief. Even though the drug smuggling activities of these two Australian sons, one of Cantonese-speaking Chinese parents and the other of Tamil parents, were recognised as illegal within the penal codes of both Indonesia and Australia. The rhetoric surrounding these incidents indicates the subjective sense of social cohesion is talked up or down to foster ‘acceptance’ of politically useful rhetoric. It draws on and perpetuates a long history of scholarly and political commentaries that steer cohesion or


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inflame ways of reading differences. For example, in the lead up and after the executions, Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop encouraged the Australian community towards national cohesion through a redemptive narrative: ‘The Government had hoped that Indonesia would show mercy to these young men, who have worked hard since their arrests to rehabilitate themselves and improve the lives of other prisoners’ (Abbott & Bishop, 2015). Yet the same government’s public rhetoric suggests no scope for redemption of disaffected and alienated young Muslim men, whose Australian citizen rights are stripped because they were lured, not by drug smuggling, but the excitement of war overseas. As Christine Milne, leaders of the Australian Greens noted, this rhetoric presses ‘the fear, anxiety [and] insecurity button’ and ‘misses the opportunity to talk up social cohesion’ (Cox, 2015). These examples show how social cohesion is a social effect of national narratives that encourage and authorise social organisation and ordering. The emergence of the Westphalian social order since the 1600s established a cultural and institutional framework that secured ‘social cohesion’ on a territorial basis organised through nation-states. The legal principle of sovereignty meant that national border regimes regulated cross-border flows, while state-citizen relations defined the character of the national territory, forms of authority and patterns of rights (Sassen 2006). The social organisation of education systems — their context, content, controls and patterns of access — were fashioned to produce imagined national communities (Anderson, 1991). This cohesion was spatially patterned, an outcome that also served as a means of creating national knowledge cultures, legitimising authority, and forming the nation’s ‘citizen’. These civil identities transacted activities ‘democratically’, ‘through words and persuasion and not through force and violence’ (Arendt, 1958: 26). Since World War II, phenomena such as economic and cultural globalisations have challenged this nation-building project. The proliferation of cross-border flows of ideas, people and goods, disturbed territorial border regimes that secured national social organisation and ordered its cultural and institutional fabric. In Australia, these global forces and geopolitical shifts, including evidence of a nascent ‘Eastphalian’ social order, drove economic and social reforms, which included restructuring of public enterprises so that they operated on the basis of market choice. These developments marketised the higher education sector in Australia. The effects became visible in the exponential growth of international student enrolments, and universities increasing dependence on these enrolments, which has elevated education to the status of a major ‘export’ industry. These globalising transitions mean deep uncertainties now surround the relation between higher education, citizenship, and social cohesion. To understand these shifting relationships we approach the university as a ‘space of orientation’. Space of orientation The ‘university’ is a social institution that is organised and ordered to support learning and identity formation. The history of universities reveals how they locate, distribute and endorse empirical and normative knowledges through networks and, in nation-states, had the effect of securing knowledge-authority orders that also cohered national knowledge cultures and imagined national communities. Understanding the effects of globalisation on higher education requires an analytical framework that questions these path-dependent narratives that are anchored by familiar territorial frames of reference. For this reason, we draw on a socio-spatial perspective that recognises the permeability of national border regimes and approach the university as a ‘space of orientation’. We illustrate our approach using a case study of Monash University to show how a university has effects on cohesion through the way they form civil identities with citizen capabilities.


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A spatial move: Robertson (2010) draws attention to the curious neglect of space and spatialities in research on education and its social effects. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre (1991), she critiques both idealist and materialist understandings of space because they split ideas from practices. Abstract representations of space are treated as texts that set them apart from social and physical spaces that they envelop and often obscure. Conversely, analyses of social relations tend to reduce ‘lived space’ to labour and products, without acknowledging the diversity of these spaces, their resources and practices, and unfolding effects in everyday life. Yet it is this relationship between ‘representations (mental space)’ and ‘real space’ that is ‘the space of people who deal with material things’ (Lefebvre 1991: 4). Ontologically, this space is

… social and real … spaces of social relations stretched out and … socially produced. Epistemologically, space can be known through categories of ideas: ‘perceived’, ‘conceived’ and ‘lived’ (Robertson, 2010: 15-6)

This material production of space becomes comprehensible, Robertson suggests, by grasping how space is made, and has active effects, through knowledge and networks. Lefebvre disaggregates how space is made by analytically distinguishing: spatial practice (the material, or perceived space); representations of space (conceptualised, or conceived space); and spaces of representation where physical space is lived through associated images or symbols as lived space. David Harvey distinguishes ‘absolute’, ‘relative’, and ‘relational’ ways of knowing space, which suggests how types of space have effects. Combining Lefebvre’s spatialisations and Harvey’s ways of knowing space reveals a relation between spatialisation and orientation that materializes as a ‘space of orientation’. Space is produced through particular ways of seeing and knowing. This means processes of space-making always come from somewhere and occurs at some ‘moment’ in time and space and unfolds through: everyday practices and perceptions; representations or theories of space; and as the spatial imaginary of the space-time frames how space is lived, experienced and felt. Lefebvre’s concept of ‘moment’ is also significant because it marks a moment of ‘revelation, emotional clarity and self-presence’ that can be seized as a basis for action, but also enables a step towards more self-fulfilled ways of being (Shields, 2004). It is these knowledge frames that Harvey (2006) foregrounds. He presents ‘absolute space’ as a materialised spatial form that is framed by the logics of capitalism, encouraging ways of seeing and knowing the world that privilege abstractions, such as ‘the market’, and disconnect representations of space from the lived spaces where people deal with material things. Harvey uses the concept of ‘relative space’ to acknowledge that spaces are always known, lived and felt from somewhere. Despite absolute space and its powerful abstractions and governing effects, in practice there are multiple vantage points from which space is seen, where ‘the spatial frame is dependent on what is being relativized and by whom’ (Harvey, 2006: 272). Combining these spatialities, and how they are known, reveals a multiplicity of spaces, but also suggests how ‘moments’ are spatialized. Recognising these moments of revelation suggests how learning, knowledge building and identity formation are also spatialised. These insights unfold out of antecedent terms and conditions that make perceived, and conceived, and lived spaces that have effects by materializing interaction, action and reaction (Appadurai 2001).

An orienting move: We build on this analysis of space and knowledge to understand how the university evolves as a more globalised form. This claim recognises how perceived, conceived and lived space are


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bordered and ordered in a university and how the way these spaces are produced has effects on the university’s orientation. However, our methodological choice is to look behind the university as abstract space and, instead, enter the university through the portal of ‘relational space’ as perceived, conceived and lived by managers, academics and students. This intellectual move reveals, what Massey (2005:9) terms ‘multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality’, ‘co-existing heterogeneity’ and ‘distinct trajectories’. Following this logic, we see the university as a co-constituting space and multiplicity: a ‘space of orientation’ that locates ‘simultaneity of stories-so-far’ Massey, 2005: 9). Our discussions that inform this chapter of Australian higher education and its effects on social cohesion draw on comparative historical sociology, cultural sociology and political philosophy. Historical sociology foregrounds ‘what people do in the present as a struggle to create a future out of the past (Abrams 1982: 8, emphasis included). It treats antecedent conditions as a source of resources. A spatial lens turns this analytical focus towards the ‘orienting’ effects of social relations that are realised through civilizational complexes: those ‘forms of society, culture, polity, religion and economy that ordinarily envelop human beings throughout their lives’ (Mandalios, 2003: 65). In this way, spaces locate and legitimise processes, such as education, that organize gregarious humans and order their forms of gregariousness. These processes of space making cannot be compartmentalised in particular domains of life — work, care, learning, or democratic self-governance — but rather play through all social relations and means of life with the effect of making life (Haug, 2015). Yet, in practice, particular representations of space become privileged while others are marginalised, giving social spaces their ‘various colourations according to time, space, symbolism, corporeality, affect structures and long-term social learning processes’ (Mandalios, 2003: 65). The university institutionalises and legitimises this social ordering of knowledge and authority, which has effects on the formation of citizens and social cohesion. The cultural turn in sociology and political science problematises the idea of the university as an absolute space: a locus of culture and civilisation based on privileged representations. This perspective approaches culture, ways of life and shared values as practices that materialise meanings, rather than as things that just exist in people’s heads. These social and symbolic practices border and order representations in ways that have empirical and normative effects: they organise and govern everyday life and they influence conduct and form identities:

… culture is about feelings, attachments and emotions as well as concepts and ideas. The expression on my face says something about who I am (identity) and what I am feeling (emotion) and what group I feel I belong to (attachment), which can be ‘read’ and understood by other people, even if I didn’t intend deliberately to communicate anything as formal as a ‘message’, and even if the other person couldn’t give a very logical account of how s/he came to understand what I was ‘saying’. (Hall, 1997: 3-4)

These social and symbolic practices produce ‘narratives’ as the ‘ontological condition of social life’ (Somers, 1994: 614). How narrativity is spatialised has effects on the empirical and normative construction, circulation and distribution of narratives, which depends on circumstances: who narrates, from where, with what resources, and relative to which frame of reference. Narrative construction is therefore a distinctive kind of cultural-political work that configures ‘constellations of relationships (connected parts) embedded in time and space, constituted by causal emplotment’ (Somers, 1994: 616). How narratives are produced and by whom, and who appropriates them, under what conditions, affects the way we come to know, understand, and make sense of the social world. For:

… it is through narratives and narrativity that we constitute our social identities … whether [or not] we are social scientists or subjects of historical research, … all of us come to be who we are (however ephemeral, multiple, and changing) by being


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located or locating ourselves (usually unconsciously) in social narratives rarely of our own making. (Somers, 1994: 606)

Somers (1995) identifies universities with the production of ‘conceptual narratives’ that rest on systematised forms of knowledge building. This conceptual narrativity produces forms of reasoning, particular knowledge-about-the-world and discourse, or ways of using words that circulate and have orienting effects in everyday life. Secured and authorised historically through university-based knowledge networks, conceptual narrativity offers concepts, vocabularies and explanatory schema. These conceptual narratives are taken up as resources in ‘ontological narratives’ that emerge as people story themselves, and ‘public narratives’, produced when organisations and networks narrate themselves to fit local circumstances. They also circulate in the form of metanarratives by being de-narrativised, abstracted from the conditions of their production, to become taken-for-granted governing truths. University-based knowledge networks become implicated in these processes of de-narrativisation as they codify knowledge and prepare professionals. But universities also house different academic tribes, which means metanarratives informed by one tribe are fair game for critique (re-narrativisation) by other tribes. It is this polyglot character, as well as its protection of conceptual narrativity, that makes the university a distinctive and also powerful space of orientation. To understand the university and its effects in orienting identities towards social cohesion, we investigated Monash University as a case study by analysing that ‘space of orientation’ as: (1) a perceived space of work and learning; (2) a conceived space governing specific representations of citizenship; and (3) a lived space where students and academics navigate cultural difference and experiences of ‘transnationalism’. This case study draws on public documentation, which we have compiled while working at Monash, and also interview-based data collected in the course of a small-scale investigation of network building amongst international students in the Faculty of Education. The university as a space of orientation Universities were central to the Westphalian nation-building project and the formation of citizens, but marketisation has shifted the values and ethics of higher education. The remaking of universities with a corporate-commercial orientation privileges consumer choice, creating a novel form of ‘Enterprise University’ in Australia (Marginson & Considine, 2000). This unbundling of the nation-building university reconstructs the space of higher education as an ‘analytic global-national borderland’ (Sassen, 2000: ?). For these reforms are not just oriented towards home-grown national developments but are reoriented by travelling policies that reference imperatives arising from the global knowledge economy and trends towards global governance (Ozga, Seddon et al. 2006, Rizvi and Lingard, 2010). These globalising trajectories remake the university as a spatialised assemblage of space and knowledge.

Shifting spatial practices: contradictory narratives The restructuring and re-culturing of higher education remakes the spatial practices of universities and disturbs the habitual idea of a ‘university’. These respatialisations shifted along four main dimensions (Axford and Seddon 2006):

• Seeing students as learning for earning — reskilling the Australian workforce, coordinated by qualifications, learning outcomes and standards, curriculum packaged as ICT-based ‘flexible delivery’. • Shifting costs of education and training from public to the private domain – the educational market, the Higher Education Contribution scheme (HECS), student loans, growth of international students and education export.


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• Reforming education and training management – from bureaucratic structures toward corporate governance. • Re-centering teaching methodologies around ICT learning platforms, software, and digital infrastructures, de-emphasising knowledge traditions & disciplines embodied by academics.

Monash University used to be described as the last of the old rather than the first of the new Australian universities. It was established in 1958 in Melbourne but now projects a self-understanding as a ‘university of transformation’ (Davison and Murphy, 2012). On the one hand, graduates collect their degree testamurs in mediaeval gowns and the university appointed its first ‘provost’ in 2012, recalling the ecclesiastical rule of St Benedict (480-547). On the other hand, these enlightenment traditions are under pressure. For example, Monash anchored its normative orientation in a statement by Sir John Monash, engineer and military leader, which was built into the pavement outside the Robert Blackwood Hall, where graduations were held. It states, ‘Adopt as your fundamental creed that you will equip yourself for life, not solely for your own benefit but for the benefit of the whole community’. But this seemingly ageless sentiment of self-less service replaced an earlier shield and Latin motto, ‘We are still learning’, in the 1990s. This old-new public identity captures the contradictory character of a global-national enterprise university. Corporatisation is also changing the university space and its culture. The shift in ratio between public and private funding means Monash now depends on ‘industry and partnerships’ and ‘alumni community’. On the university website, these stakeholders appear on the same scale as teaching and research. Shifts in student enrolments also suggest changes in the boundaries that define the university. In 2015, Monash students (63,002) included 56 per cent women, 34 per cent enrolled as international students, and 16 per cent studying on-line or in a mixed mode (Monash University, 2015a). The re-bordering of Monash had effects on the spatial ordering of university work as Monash rescaled its national footprint as a global space with local footprints. By 2015, Monash had five campuses in Australia; one each in Malaysia and South Africa; a centre in Italy; a joint research academy with the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay; and a joint graduate school in Suzhou with Southeast University (SEU) in China. The possibility of a ‘global university’ was realised in a new globally distributed space of higher education; the Monash Warwick Alliance that aimed to ‘help meet the increasing student, industry and government demand for universities to produce graduates with a global education’ (Monash University, 2015b). These trends are not restricted to Monash University, but are evident across the Australian higher education sector. For example, the number of formal international agreements between Australian universities with China increased and, by 2005, China was the lead international academic partner rather than the US (Universities Australia, 2009). Such cross-border mobility builds on the history of migration to Australia, but also challenges national narratives. Australia is no longer a white European outpost in the Pacific, but a multicultural space that is actively transforming.

Space of representation: ambiguous governance orientations How a territory is bordered and ordered has effects on sociality, practice of citizenship and citizen capabilities necessary to sustain life. How these understandings are narrated becomes significant in times of change. For example, writing after the second European war, Hannah Arendt (1958) looked back to the origins of democratic politics that were anchored in the Greek Athenian city state in order to re-affirm the idea of an ‘active life’ after totalitarianism. She identified this vita activa as an hierarchical integration of citizen ‘action’, biological


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‘labour’, and ‘work’ as production of use-objects that create a human worldliness, positioning action as ‘speech’ though, as the higher order space of appearance (Arendt, 1958, 7). In the shifting spaces of enterprise universities, these insights turn attention to university governance, and how university spaces of orientation steer learning for citizenship. For example, Vice-Provost (Graduate Education) Zlatko Skrbis (2014: 3), advocates for ‘global citizenship’ premised on an ethic of cosmopolitanism: a capacity for judging that builds on the Kantian Original Compact - an obligation to all other humans by virtue of our own humanity. Global citizenship, inclusive democratic citizenship in its widest sense, as Skrbis suggests, is a practice as much as a perspective. It is about making these ways of acting and connecting globally an integral component of engagement in university education through teaching philosophies, policies, and curricula (Harris, 2014:11). These statements suggest the horizons of university governance morally ought to and are shifting beyond national borders. Under the Commonwealth of Australia Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Act 2011 (Parliament of Australia, TEQSA Act 2011), all Australian Universities must develop Graduate Attributes. The Commonwealth’s Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) then evaluates universities’ development and assessment of student achievement against these attributes, for registration purposes. The Monash Graduate Attributes policy reads:

Monash University prepares its graduates to be: 1. Responsible and effective global citizens who: a) engage in an internationalised world; b) exhibit cross-cultural competence; c) demonstrate ethical values 2. Critical and creative scholars who: a) produce innovative solutions to problems b) apply research skills to a range of challenges c) communicate perceptively and effectively

(Monash University, 2011, emphasis added)

The significance of this representation is that it establishes a point of reference for the act of judging. Judging is the point where ‘actor and spectator become united’, where ‘the maxim of the actor and the maxim, the “standard” according to which the spectator judges the spectacle of the world [,] become one’ (Arendt, 1978: 271). As such, the Graduate Attributes policy represents a point in time orientation of judgements by the responsible university governance body in terms of the ends of a university education. In turn, this representation influences actions and judgements by university managers, academics and students in relation to forming and graduating global citizens. Australian higher education quality assurance processes and standards are largely centrally defined and monitored since the TEQSA Act 2011. But universities define their own ‘key graduate attributes’: potentially a small oasis of autonomous judgement in the legislatorial landscape. Yet on examination, this glimmer may be mirage, given the normative steering effects of quality assurance and continuous improvement. As Morley (2003) predicted, ‘in time, no university in any national location will be able to escape the gravitational pull of the quality assurance discourse’ (p. 21) because they form ‘powerful policy condensates, demanding consensus and orthodoxy’ (p.14). Monash Academic Board approved the Monash Graduate Attributes policy in 2011. The conceived space of orientation through which the


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idea of global citizenship unfolded as a graduate attribute, is revealed through changes in Academic Board. For instance, in 2006 the Academic Board had 150 members; in 2014 there were 88 members in a ‘tripartite structure of ex-officio members, Heads of Academic Unit members and 31 elected positions (including four student positions). This shift in composition was unfolded alongside developments in quality assurance. Academic Boards, in Australia, sit organizationally under the university’s principle governing body as ‘the principal policy-making and advisory body on all academic matters’ (Dooley, Wormell & McCallum, 2013: 1). Consistent with 36 reports prepared by the Australian University Quality Agency (predecessor of TEQSA) that were critical of how several university academic boards led ‘collegial processes of debate, discussion and review’ (Baird, 2007: 108), the 2006 AUQA audit of Monash University suggested a review to strengthen Academic Board’s role in university governance (Australian Universities Quality Agency, 2006: 14). By 2014 the Monash Academic Board terms of reference indicated the reduced member numbers and described the ‘cohort of elected members from the broader University community of staff and students’ as ‘visibly reflecting elements of collegiality and democratic participation in university academic affairs’ (Monash University, 2014: 6 emphasis added). Equally the same Terms of Reference clearly state that compliance with quality assurance requirements is a core rationale for its existence:

Establishment of the Academic Board is also necessary to ensure compliance with the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) Higher Education Standards Framework. (Monash University, 2014: 5 emphasis added.)

The endorsement of global citizenship as a graduate attribute contributes to the re-making of Monash University as a conceived space. But consistent with its contradictory spatial practices, the university space of representation condenses conflicting orientations. The process of Monash ‘going global’ is tensioned between a cosmopolitan ethic and perhaps, in Mann’s (1970) terms, a ‘”pragmatic acceptance” by subordinate classes of their limited roles in society’.

Spaces of multiplicity: living space transnationally

So it's interesting to see... how lots of things are happening on a global scale and at the same time be able to see the similarities of each country, which .... wouldn't be possible if I weren't here [studying through Monash]. It wouldn't be possible at all if I didn't have the opportunity to meet and to talk to these people from different contexts. (pppp)

This quote is from a postgraduate student enrolled in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. She was interviewed in a small-scale research project that investigated ‘Connecting Up’ amongst international students. The student’s comment captures this connecting in ways that reveal interactive and overlapping national and global domains. Saskia Sassen (2002) describes these spaces where people are now likely to live and where entities, such as universities operate as ‘analytic global-national borderlands’: it is where ‘global’, ‘national’ and ‘in-between’ space-times become apparent analytically because they are ordered in ways that show ‘considerable internal differentiation and growing mutual imbrication with the other’ (Sassen, 2002: 215). As the student suggests, these polyglot borderlands locate moments where space and orientations reference different and multiple worlds. Understanding these borderlands means recognising the absolute space of the university, and also how it is relativized by different actors: managers in university governance; academics who make spaces for learning; and students who learn. These spatialities each constitute particular relational spaces where


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people’s learning and working feed into the university as a space of orientation. As the university becomes a global-national borderland, its space of orientation moves in ways that make in-between spaces and transnational orientations both imaginable and lived. For

… despite great distances and notwithstanding the presence of international borders (and all the laws, regulations and national narratives they represent) certain kinds of relationships have been globally intensified and now take place paradoxically in a planet-spanning yet common – however virtual- arena of activity. (Vertovec, 1999: 447)

These novel borderlands produce relational spaces and orientations that de-nationalise national territories and also make practices of global citizenship conceivable (Sassen, 2013). How these emergent de-nationalised and re-territorialised spaces and orientations sediment has effects on forms of interaction, action and reaction, locating spaces where ‘new forms of the social and the political can be made’, rather than as spaces for ‘enacting ritualized routines’ (Sassen, 2013: ?). These making moments also produce spatialisations and orientations that prompt novel ways of working and learning with effects on knowledge building and identity formation. Student spaces International research and postgraduate students make space for important work between the governed spaces and physical spaces of Monash Faculty of Education:

....the thing is that everybody meets at the kitchen at one point in the day. So at least say “hello” or “hi” or whatever it takes place there in the kitchen. On the same floor. [Connecting up occurs] basically because of the kitchen. (xxxx)

The possibility of practical encounters in the faculty builds friendships, and also new ‘biographies of citizenship’, characterized by ‘dynamic identities, open, weak-tie relationships and more fluid, short-lived commitments in informal permeable institutions and associations’ (Harris, 2014: 7):

The first time I came here I felt that the most important thing that I had achieved was basically knowing people from other countries. Not necessarily network in the professional sense – at that time my friends were basically a Japanese guy who was doing archaeology, a Masters, and this guy from the Netherlands who was also doing a Masters of Arts but he was a journalist, and this girl from Sudan she was doing a Masters in applied linguistics. And this other person – this boy from – he was older than me anyway but he was from Australia and he worked for the government, he was a specialist in Indonesian languages and yeah we were good friends at the moment. Facebook didn’t exist though. And I have this Iranian man who would play the Santoor. It was beautiful music. He was a music teacher as well. So he was doing his Master in music. And most of us, except for the Australian person, met at the academic writing class because none of them – none of us had English as a first language. We were all international students. Now that was my treasure for all this time. (oooo)

Making friends offers lots of benefits: broadening horizons but also developing a sense of the way spaces are relativised through particular representations. Two student elaborated these issues by reflecting on the value of learning about other cultures:

… you get to learn about life in that country. You also learn how the educational system works there and it makes you take a bigger perspective – you know, it opens


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up your eyes. It’s like seeing how life really works which is sometimes far beyond or far less than what is expressed in journal articles most of the time or chapters.(qqqq)

… Australian schools are featured in the seminars and the group discussions, so I try to not discuss only with Chinese students. For example I try to discuss with other students from other countries. I think that their insightful ideas, gave me a lot of ideas when discussing …. And their insightfulness, and their creativity give me a lot of idea …. a lot of fresh ideas about how these ideas is actually [….. ] different from Chinese stereotypes, and Chinese mindsets. (yyyy)

These reality checks are directed at Australia as well as the students’ home country. Their comments also reveal how they relativise the university space from a positioning that reveals their home lives and social status.

Maybe because a lot of us are just English majors and it seems that my friends here are quite better than my Chinese ones because we often have the same process to be here. We have a house and we struggle for life here and the most difficult thing is to buy the stuff like bread or something it's really heavy for us to carry it. Every time I go to the supermarket with my friends and we handle the heavy stuff back home and we say, ‘Shit go back to China’. When we are in China we have cars, parents cars and we can just drive them everywhere and then we do not have to go the supermarket it's my parents thing to do. I just write what I want to eat and they will buy it for me, now they just give me money. (zzzz)

Several students mentioned the role of online spaces as means of overcoming the ‘short-lived’ nature of the international student experience. Several students shared Facebook group sites. They had been established to make a space that allowed the students to connect up while in Australia and also beyond their time as students. They recognised the possibility of collaborations as they moved beyond postgraduate study into academic positions, but also knew the formal rules that governed the university space of study.

Other PhD students and I think that that is a good way to think about keeping this network alive even with we no longer physically in Australia anymore. I think that having the Facebook account will still allow us to communicate easier than we are email. Because once we have done here the emails account from Monash are closed down. (rrrr)

Teaching spaces Transnationalism is also a feature of some teaching programs. For example, the Master in Adult Education (Global) was designed and operated as transnational space for learning at Monash University, until 2014. It was based on a partnership between four universities: British Columbia (Canada), Western Cape (South Africa), Linkoping (Sweden) and Monash. This intercontinental masters program deliberately constructed a transnational space of orientation through the selection, organisation and authorisation of practices that acknowledged the distinctive potential of adult learning in conditions of global change. The curriculum, pedagogy and assessment targeted the practice of adult learning and global change, and also oriented students towards critical questions, knowledge building and identity formation that encouraged students to become researcher-professionals. A formal Memorandum of Understanding governed these institutional arrangements but the development of the legal framework was a product of the partners’ learning and the experience of developing and running the program. It was based on co-operation between universities, and academic commitments to include multiple voices and ways of knowing from different parts of the world within an online pedagogy (Larsson et al, 2005:62).


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This fully online learning offered ways of building global citizenship in higher education that could not be duplicated in nationally focused universities and programs. The teaching principles oriented course materials towards ‘interdependence in the transnational space’ (Larsson et al, 2005: 63). Each ‘course’ (unit) included tasks where students collaborated across countries and used resources from the settings where students lived and worked. The online teaching technology meant that people were brought together in a space that was no-ones territory but, rather, a transnational space where ways of working ad rules of conduct had to be negotiated between participants. The ALGC reveals the paradox of online pedagogies in creating an intimate yet global (online) space of orientation. This pedagogy is realised through experiential learning strategies that foster reflexive acts of participation that are framed and designed to encourage global collaborations, turning learning towards knowledge and processes of knowledge-building that promote a cosmopolitan ethos. As Rizvi (2009: 265) suggests:

… it is now possible to do this kind of pedagogic work through networks , both informal and formal, bringing together students from different backgrounds with the aim of encouraging them to think outside their own parochial boundaries and cultural assumptions, helping them reflect on how global processes affect communities differentially and to examine the sources of these documentations and inequalities and what could be done about them.

Here is one student’s account of exactly this process:

This course has been an interesting battle for me, both from a personal and a professional standpoint. Initially in choosing this Masters, I wanted a more corporate learning feel, multinational focus … the plan was to just get a Masters so I could move to New York and work in the UN. That was five years ago … Little did I know where this journey would end for me … So this may not have been the course I wanted to do however something captured my interest, I stayed on and it became the course I needed to do … I was shocked as to how much I learnt about things I didn’t know about in the world, things I had no interest in prior to commencing this course and how very beneficial it has been in my understanding of the world and my place within it. I’ve been reading my old assignments … and am proud of the work I first did in the program. I am surprised about the influence of the course readings and discussions have on my current practice and the critical lens that I now view a lot of my practice through. I wanted to make a difference and help before I joined this program. I had a vague global focus but really knew very little about it. Through this course and through my interactions, my interests have shifted to helping locally rather than globally … I’m very much open to new avenues of work and learning. I don’t know where I will go from here but I know that they are different from when I started. Im a little scared about the future but also a little excited.

The idea of global citizenship offers a way of ‘thinking beyond the nation’ (Skrbis, 2014: 6). It suggests the possibility of ‘global fellowship’ (Appiah’s, 1996), where practices and spaces embrace multiple voices and perspectives. When these processes sediment through universities, they produce spaces of orientation that prompt processes of learning and working that bring people together and build novel ways of knowing, building knowledge, and making decisions that frame action.


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Towards social cohesion?

Hannah Arendt suggests, ethical power is ‘actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal’ (1958: 200). Yet work and learning in universities is increasingly defined by spaces where word and deed have parted company. There is considerable evidence that words empty with the pursuit of technocratic futures, while deeds vere: sometimes towards brutalities that disregard ways of making and sustaining life itself; towards normativities; and sometimes towards cosmopolitanisms. Yet acknowledging the university as a global-national borderland reveals spaces and orientations that suggest social cohesion is being remade, not just disturbed. As students suggest, social cohesion is not just bordered and ordered on a national territorial basis, because there are spaces for connection that foster friendships and encourage processes of working and building knowledge and ways of knowing together. While such learning may not seem necessary to students, or to academics and university managers, it is a normative imperative ‘if we are to develop ways of ethically steering the direction of local-global relations, instead of allowing them to be shaped simply by the dictates of global corporate capitalism’ (Rizvi, 2009: 254). To finish, we underline the importance of looking at the university as a global-national borderland rather than just relying on habitual territorialised eyes. This way of seeing the university rests on an analytical move; it is not necessarily visible until the spatialization and orientation of a university is questioned. Monash University is often seen as just another Australian university – and it is, but only in part. It is those parts that are not strictly territorialised where novel practices are emerging. In these spaces, where people ‘deal with material things’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 4) in-between global and national imperatives and habits of mind, is where possibilities of social cohesion informed by some logic of global citizenship might emerge. References Abbott, Hon Tony, Prime Minister of Australia and Bishop, Hon Julie, Minister for Foreign

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Higher education and social cohesion: Universities, citizenship and spaces of orientation

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