Contemporary Danish strategies of internationalisation through student mobility with China: the development of instrumentality in interculturality

This paper examines current Danish strategies of developing internationalisation through student mobility programs with China in higher education. By interrogating Danish policies of internationalisation, the paper brings attention to contemporary conditions for Danish higher education to facilitate student mobility with its Chinese counterpart at a structural political level. By analysing motivations, assumptions and expectations for internationalisation initiatives, it is argued that policies developed and formulated at a national political level presuppose and favour certain meanings of internationalisation and culture and in doing so frame the understanding of these in a limiting sense. Instrumentalist discourses of the competition state enclose and marginalise other competing discourses of internationalisation. The contextualisation of higher education within the national economy and the international global market space transforms and reduces the concepts of internationalisation and culture to tools for economic growth, and subtly leads to essentialist discourses of the past. The paper further examines how this relates to the general tendencies of the current educational system in Denmark. Discourse analysis of key policy documents is employed.