Pedagogy of Academic Mobility

This chapter proposes the concept of ‘other thinking’ where otherness is positioned from within, instead of outside or opposite the dominant culture or host nation. Drawing from critical pedagogy and place-based approaches, it considers how academic mobility itself is a process of othering. In this autobiographic account, I explore otherness through the ‘eyes of the beholder’, while problematizing the monoracial tendency to impose identity and status based on my place of origin and ethnicity. To do this, the pedagogy I attend to refers to the process of (un)becoming the other by transgressing the binary logic of the neocolonial forces of globalization and immigration. It argues for the need to decolonize the focus of pedagogy from the globalized theoretical discourses of the corporate university to the particular lived experience or experiential dimension of critical pedagogy. I have become a neo-liberal and colonized subject as a non-EU/UK migrant academic. I could not escape the prescribed consciousness of the West and the coloniality of my being. However, I can replace and move my identity to an ‘other’ within. Such boundary-making could become a ‘subject matter’ to replace and reposition various disciplinary perspectives and discourses of educational research and practice