Standpoint and the ‘Internationalisation ’ of Higher Education

How adequate are current theoretical standpoints, tools and categories for explaining the flows of international students to Anglo/American/European universities? There is a growing literature on the internationalisation of higher education, well represented in this volume. This includes critical policy analyses that attempt to outline the linkages between state, economy and university institutional strategies (Mok, 2008), the analysis of marketing discourses and strategies (Mok & Tan, 2007; Sidhu, 2003), studies of digital teaching and learning in offshore and external university studies by international students (Doherty, 2006), second language and academic writing studies (Kubota, 2001), and a vast qualitative literature on the cultural and learning experiences of international students and their teachers in the West (Singh & Doherty, 2004; Kettle, 2005, 2007). Taken together, this work has begun to provide us with a rich analytic and empirical description of the internationalisation of universities in the context of cultural globalisation and, indeed, economic crisis. This essay takes a different analytic tact and historical standpoint to the stud