Transcending the national sense of place and belonging? Place-identity politics in transnational higher education

“Transcending the national sense of place and belonging? – Place-identity politics in transnational higher education” analyses how new transnational higher education institutions as state strategies to foster internationalisation in education shape future citizenry. More specifically, the author examines the construction of place-identities and future aspirations for citizenry among students in transnational education among students in transnational higher education using a master’s degree programme at the Sino-Danish Center for Education and Research in Beijing as case. Intercultural skills and a cosmopolitan outlook are competencies that are often mentioned as important in ensuring nation-states’ global competitiveness, and the creation of a future citizenry transcending national boundaries has at times been considered imperative. Li asks how such imagined future aspirations for the citizenry of students in welfare state education are differentiated by the scaled place-identity practices. She turns to theories of place, scale and mobility, as well as the concept of intersectionality, in a discussion of the ethnographic data and of what is at stake in this transnational educational space. The research shows that practices of place-identity are shaped through certain performances in the educational programme involving intersections of nationality with gender and age, and thereby shaping the students’ global intercultural skills in different, and unequal, ways. Thus, the processes of transnational education are produced through the unequal structures that are linked to global imaginaries of national hierarchies. Li asks that educators should rethink practices that might reproduce Western colonial legacy and unequal global structures in transnational educational programmes.