Internationalization, Whiteness, and Biopolitics of Higher Education
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32674/jis.v11iS1.3843Keywords:
internationalization, higher education, neocolonialism, biopower, biopolitics, whiteness, racism, citizenshipAbstract
From a postcolonial perspective, U.S. higher education is entangled with the colonial past and the neoliberal neo-colonial present as an economic actor that dominates global educational markets through internationalization. The COVID pandemic and the nationwide movement for racial justice have brought these entanglements into stark relief in the ways U.S. colleges and universities are implicated in the neoliberal biopolitics of race. Applied to higher education, Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics as the management of life and wellbeing of populations and his conceptualization of racism as a biopolitical tool illuminate how U.S. colleges and universities maintain racialized categorizations of lives worth protecting and lives considered disposable in the service of dominant whiteness. De-centering whiteness and eliminating its advantage and superiority in research, curricula, instruction, and internationalization is a necessary step toward a future that envisions a more inclusive and equal citizenship.
References
Ahlquist, R. (2011). The “Empire” strikes back via a neoliberal agenda: Confronting the legacies of colonialism. Counterpoints, 402, 9-32.
Allen, L. and Rasmussen, M. L. (2015). Queer conversation in straight spaces: An interview with Mary Lou Rasmussen about queer theory in higher education. Higher Education Research and Development, 34(4), 685-694. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2015.1062072
Andreotti, V. O. (2015). Global citizenship education otherwise. In A. A. Abdi, L. Shulz, and T. Pillay (Eds.), Decolonizing global citizenship education (pp. 221-229). Sense Publishers.
Andreotti, V. O., Stein, S., Ahenakew, C., & Hunt, D. (2015). Mapping interpretations of decolonization in the context of higher education. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society, 4(1), 21-40.
Ansley, F. L. (1997). Race and the core curriculum in legal education. In J. Stefancic and R. Delgado (Eds.), Critical white studies: Looking behind the mirror (pp. 214-219). Temple University.
American Psychological Association. (2020, May 29). “We are living in a racism pandemic,” says APA President. https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2020/05/racism-pandemic
Apata, G. O. (2020). “I can’t breathe”: The suffocating nature of racism. Theory, Culture & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420957718
Bazzul, J. (2017). Biopolitics and the “subject” of labor in science education. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 12, 873-887. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-017-9840-2
BBC News. (2020, December 9). Rich countries hoarding Covid vaccines, says People’s Vaccine Alliance. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-55229894
Blanco Ramirez, G. (2014). Trading quality across borders: Colonial discourse and international quality assurance policies in in higher education. Tertiary Education and Management, 20, 121-134. https://doi.org/10.1080/13583883.2014.896025
Bowman, B. (2020). On the biopolitics of breathing: Race, protests, and state violence under the global threat of COVID-19. South African Journal of Psychology, 50(3), 312-315.
Bourassa, G. (2011). Rethinking the curricular imagination: Curriculum and biopolitics in the age of neoliberalism. Curriculum Inquiry, 41(1), 5-16.
Bourassa, G. (2019). Educational biopolitics, innovation, and social reproduction. In M. Peters and R. Heraud (Eds.), Encyclopedia of educational innovation (pp. 1-6). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2262-4_114-1
Brandzel, A. L. (2016). Against citizenship: The violence of the normative. The University of Illinois Press.
Brown, S. and Najmabadi, S. (2017, January 27). Shock, despair, and outrage: Academics condemn Trump’s immigration crackdown. The Chronicle of Higher Education. http://www.chronicle.com/article/Shock-DespairOutrage-/239041
Buckner, E. (2019). The internationalization of higher education: National interpretations of a global model. Comparative Education Review, 63(3), 315-336.
Buckner, E. and Stein, S. (2019). What counts as internationalization? Deconstructing the internationalization imperative. Journal of Studies in International Education, 24(2), 151-166. https://doi.org/10.1177/1028315319829878
Cabrera, N. L. (2020). “Never forget” the history of racial oppression: Whiteness, white immunity, and educational debt in higher education. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 52(2), 37-40. https://doi.org/10.1080/00091383.2020.1732774
Cabrera, N. L., Franklin, J. D., & Watson, J. S. (2017). Whiteness in higher education: The invisible missing link in diversity and racial analyses: ASHE higher education report, 42(6). Wiley.
Cary, L. J. (2001). The refusals of citizenship: Normalizing practices in social educational discourses. Theory and Research in Social Education, 29(3), 405-430. https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2001.10505949
Chatterjee, P. and Maira, S. (2014). The imperial university: Race, war, and the nation-state. In P. Chatterjee and S. Maira (Eds.), The imperial university: Academic repression and scholarly dissent (pp. 1-50). University of Minnesota Press.
Deem, R., Mok,K. H., & Lucas, L. (2008). Transforming higher education in whose image? Exploring the concept of the “world-class” university in Europe and Asia. Higher Education Policy, 21, 83-97.
Demetri, F. (2020, March 21). Biopolitics and coronavirus, or don’t forget Foucault. Naked Punch. http://www.nakedpunch.com/articles/306
De Wit, H. (2020). Internationalization of higher education: The need for a more ethical and qualitative approach. Journal of International Students, 10(1), i-iv.
Dixon-Román, E. J. (2017). Regenerative capacities: New materialisms, inheritance, and biopolitical technologies in education policy. Equity and Excellence in Education, 50(4), 434-445. https://doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2017.1399098
D’Hoest, F. and Lewis, T. E. (2015). Exhausting the fatigue university: In search of a biopolitics of research. Ethics and Education, 10(1), 49-60. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449642.2014.998023
Done, E. J. (2015). Mandatory accreditation for Special Educational Needs Co-ordinators: Biopolitics, neoliberal managerialism and the Deleuzo-Guattarian “war machine.” Journal of Education Policy, 30(1), 86-100.
Douglas-Gabriel, D. (2020, August 4). “The kids will forget”: Custodians, housekeepers and other support staff brace for college reopenings. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/08/04/kids-will-forget-custodians-housekeepers-other-support-staff-brace-college-reopenings/
Dutta, M. J. (2020). Whiteness, internationalization, and erasure: Decolonizing futures from the Global South. Communication and the Critical/Cultural Studies, 17(2), 228-235. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2020.1770825
Ellis, L. (2020, April 28). How the Coronavirus might—or might not—slow research universities’ ambitions. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-the-Coronavirus-Might-/248650
Erbsen, H. (2018). The biopolitics of international exchange: International education exchange programs—facilitator or victim in the battle for biopolitical normativity? Russian Politics, 3(1), 68-87.
Esposito, R. (2012). Community, immunity, biopolitics. Política común, 3. http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/pc.12322227.0003.001
Esposito, R. (2020, February 28). Cured to the bitter end. European Journal of Psychoanalysis. http://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/?fbclid=IwAR1wyD5z7iP8MjqXkJXDifNaZ7qBZSavluXT53aNMWiwJfFTOzoGf_2sCL8
Evans-Winters, V. E. (2017). Necropolitics and education. In G. Sirrakos and C. Emdin (Eds.), Between the world and the urban classroom (pp. 19-33). SensePublishers. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6351-032-5
Fiaccadori, E. (2015). State racism and the paradox of biopower. Foucault Studies, 19, 151-171.
Foucault, M. (1975-1976/2003). Society must be defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76 (David Macey, Trans.). Picador.
Foucault, M. (1977–1978/2007). Security, territory, population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977-1978 (Michel Senellart, Ed. and Graham Burchell, Trans.). Palgrave Macmillan.
Giroux, H. A. (2006). Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, class, and the biopolitics of disposability. College Literature, 33(3), 171-196.
Giroux, H. A. (2008). Beyond the politics of disposability: Rethinking neoliberalism in the New Gilded Age. Social Identities, 14(5), 587-620.
Gonzales-Brambila, C. N., Reyes-Gonzales, L., Veloso, F., and Peres-Agnon, M. A. (2016). The scientific impact of developing nations. PLoS One, 11(3). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0151328
Gyamera, G. O. and Burke, P. J. (2018). Neoliberalism and curriculum in higher education: A post-colonial analysis. Teaching in Higher Education, 23(4), 450-467. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2017.1414782
Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. (2020, October 29). Innovating on campus: Supporting mental health of students of color during COVID-19 and beyond. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRJIGOaOwtE
Hayes, A. (2020). Epistemic democracy and international students. Journal of International Students, 19(2). https://doi.org/10.32674/jis.v10i2.1968
Hoeg, D. and Bencze, L. (2017). Rising against a gathering storm: A biopolitical analysis of citizenship in STEM policy. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 12, 843-861. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-017-9838-9
Hope, A. (2014). Biopower and school surveillance technologies 2.0. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 37(7), 885-904. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2014.1001060
Howell, A. and Richter-Montpetit, M. (2019). Racism in Foucauldian security studies: Biopolitics, white war, and whitewashing of colonial and racial violence. International Political Sociology, 13, 2-19.
Johnson, E. and Patel, V. (2020, August 19). How Covid-19 united the higher-ed work force. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-covid-19-united-the-higher-ed-work-force
Johnson, K. A. C. (2020). 21st century international higher education hotspots: International student mobility growth in nontraditional destination countries. Journal of International Education, 10(1), https://doi.org/10.32674/jis.v10i1.1851
Johnstone, M. and Lee, E. (2020). Education as a site for the Imperial project to preserve whiteness supremacy from the colonial era to the present: A critical analysis of international education policy in Canada. Whiteness and Education, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1080/23793406.2020.1784038
Kamola, I. (2014). US universities and the production of the global imaginary. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 16(3), 515-533.
Karter, J. M., Robbins, B. D., and McInerney, R. G. (2020). Student activism in the neoliberal university: A hermeneutic phenomenological analysis. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 1-30, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022167819834751
Kearl, B. (2019). Special education as neoliberal property: The racecraft, biopolitics, and immunization of disability. Educational Studies, 55(4), 473-488. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2019.1630126
Kidman, J. (2020). Whither decolonization? Indigenous scholars and the problem of inclusion in the neoliberal university. Journal of Sociology, 56(2), 247-262.
Kim, J. (2020, April 1). Teaching and learning after COVID-19. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/learning-innovation/teaching-and-learning-after-covid-19
Knight, J. (2004). Internationalization remodeled: Definition, approaches, and rationales. Journal of Studies in International Education, 8(1), 5-31.
Land, M. & Libal , K. (2017, January 31). Trump is undermining higher education as a global enterprise. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/Trump-Is-Undermining-Higher/239060
Latour, B. (2020, March 26). Is this a dress rehearsal? Critical Inquiry. https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/03/26/is-this-a-dress-rehearsal/
Lee, S., & Waters, S. F. (2020). Asians and Asian Americans’ experiences of racial discrimination during the COVID-19 pandemic: Impacts on health outcomes and the buffering role of social support. Stigma and Health. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/sah0000275
Lewis, T. E. (2009). Education and the immunization paradigm. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 28, 485-498. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-009-9140-8
Litam, S. D. A. (2020). “Take your kung-fu back to Wuhan”: Counseling Asians, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders with race-based trauma related to COVID-19. The Professional Counselor, 10(2), 144-156. https://doi.org/10.15241/sdal.10.2.144
Lorenzini, D. (2020, April 2). Biopolitics in the time of coronavirus. Critical Inquiry. https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04/02/biopolitics-in-the-time-of-coronavirus/
Mangan. K. (2020, June 8). After years of delays, colleges are quickly acting on protesters’ demands. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www-chronicle-com.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/article/After-Years-of-Delays/248949?cid=wcontentgrid_hp_4
Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11-40.
McGuire, P. (2021, January 8). Colleges share blame for assault on democracy. Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/colleges-share-the-blame-for-assault-on-democracy
McWhorter, L. (2010). Racism and bipower. In R. Martinez (Ed.), On race and racism in America: Confessions in philosophy (pp. 55-85). Pennsylvania State University Press.
Mignolo, W. (2011). The darker side of western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Duke University Press.
Mitchell, D. E., and Nielsen, S. Y. (2012). Internationalization and globalization in higher education. In H. Cuadra-Montiel (Ed.), Globalization – Education and management agendas (pp. 3–22), https://doi.org/10.5772/48702
Moses, M., Maeda, D. J., and Paguyo, C. H. (2017). Racial politics, resentment, and affirmative action: Asian Americans as “model” college applicants. Journal of Higher Education, 90(1), 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2018.1441110
Naidoo, R. (2011). Rethinking development: Higher Education and the new imperialism In R. King, S. Marginson, and R. Naidoo (Eds.), Handbook on globalization and higher education (pp. 40-58). Edward Elgar Publishing.
Nakayama, T. K. (2020). Whiteness is not contained. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 17(2), 199-201. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2020.1770821
Olssen, M. (2004). Foucault and Marxism: Rewriting the theory of historical materialism. Policy Futures in Education, 2(3-4), 454-482.
Olssen, M. and Peters, M. A. (2005). Neoliberalism, higher education, and the knowledge economy: From the free market to knowledge capitalism. Journal of Education Policy, 20(3), 313-345.
Open Doors. (2020). Annual release. https://opendoorsdata.org/annual-release/
Patel, L. (2014). Countering coloniality in educational research: From ownership to answerability. Educational Studies, 50(4), 357-377. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2014.924942
Phillips, D. K. and Nava, R. Ch. (2011). Biopower, disciplinary power, and the production of “the good Latino/a teacher.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 32(1), 71-83. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2011.537074
Pineda, P., Gregorutti, G., & Streitwieser, B. (2020). Emerging decolonized research collaboration: The Max Planck Society and the Leibnitz Associate in Latin America. Journal of Studies in International Education, 24(1), 59-78. https://doi.org/10.1177/1028315319888891
Reid, J. (2005). The biopolitics of the war on terror: The critique of the 'return of imperialism' thesis in international relations. Third World Quarterly, 26(2), 237-252.
Rizvi, F. (2020). Reimagining recovery for a more robust internationalization. Higher Education Research & Development, 39(7), 1313-1316.
Ritter, Z. S. and Roth, K. R. (2021). International students need not apply: Impact of the US immigration policy in the Trump era on international student enrollment and campus experiences. In K. R. Roth and Z. S. Ritter (Eds.), Whiteness, power, and resisting change in US higher education (pp. 77-101). Pelgrave. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57292-1_5
Ruglis, J. (2010). Mapping the biopolitics of school dropout and youth resistance. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 24(5), 627-637.
Sevage, L. (2009). The scholarship of teaching and learning and the neo-liberalization of higher education: Constructing the “entrepreneurial learner.” Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 39(2), 24-44.
Shahjahan, R. A. (2011). Decolonizing the evidence-based education and policy movement: Revealing the colonial vestiges in educational policy, research, and neoliberal reform. Journal of Education Policy, 26(2), 181-206. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2010.508176
Singh, M., Gray, T., Hall, T., & Downey, G. (2018). Globalizing higher education policy practice: Internationalizing education through learning transformations in knowledge construction. In T. Hall, T. Gray, G. Downey, and M. Sing (Eds.), The globalization of higher education (pp. 445-460). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74579-4_27
Sliwa, M., Meier Sorensen, B., and Cairn, J. (2015). “You have to choose a novel”: The biopolitics of critical management education. Management Learning, 46(3), 243-259.
Sonu, D. (2020). Making a racial difference: A foucauldian analysis of school memories told by undergraduate students of color in the United States. Critical Studies in Education, https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2020.1763415.
Stein, S. (2017). Internationalization for an uncertain future: Tensions, paradoxes, and possibilities. The Review of Higher Education, 41(1), 3-32.
Stein, S. (2018). Racialized frames of value in U.S. university responses to the travel ban. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 17(4), 893-919.
Stein. S. (2020). A colonial history of the higher education present: Rethinking land-grant institutions through processes of accumulation and relations of conquest. Critical Studies in Education, 61(2), 212-228. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2017.1409646
Stein, S. and Andreotti, V.O. (2017). Higher education and the modern/colonial imaginary. Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies, 17(3), 173-181. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708616672673
Streitwieser, B., Loo, B., Ohorodnik, M, & Jeong, J. (2019). Access for refugees into higher education: A review of interventions in North America and Europe. Journal of Studies in International Education, 23(4), 473-496. https://doi.org/10.1177/1028315318813201
Squire, D., Williams, B.C., and Tuitt, F. (2018). Plantation politics and neoliberal racism in higher education: A framework for reconstructing anti-resist institutions. Teacher’s College Record, 120, 1-20.
Sperduti, V. R. (2017). Internationalization as westernization in higher education. Comparative & International Education, 9, 9-12.
Suspitsyna, T. (2015). Cultural hierarchies in the discursive representations of China in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Critical Studies in Education, 56(1), 21-37.
Suspitsyna, T. and Shalka, T. (2019). The Chinese international student as a (post)colonial other: An analysis oof cultural representations in a US media discourse. Review of Higher Education, 42S, 287-308. http://doi.org/10.1353/rhe.20190053
Taylor, B. J., Cantwell, B., Watts, K., and Woods, O. (2019). Partisanship, white racial resentment, and state support for higher education. Journal of Higher Education, 91(6), 858-887. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2019.1706016
Todoran, C. and Peterson, C. (2020). Should they stay or should they go? How the 2017 U.S. Travel Ban affects international doctoral students. Journal of Studies in International Education, 24(4), 440-455. https://doi.org/10.1177/1028315319861344
Wallsten, K., Nteta, T. M., McCarthy, L. A., and Tarsi, M. R. (2017). Prejudice or principled conservatism? Racial resentment and white opinion toward paying college athletes. Political Research Quarterly, 70(1), 209-222. https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912916685186
Webel, M. (2020, March 25). Calling COVID-19 a ‘Chinese virus” is wrong and dangerous—the pandemic is global. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/calling-covid-19-a-chinese-virus-is-wrong-and-dangerous-the-pandemic-is-global-134307
Winnubst, S. (2020). The many lives of fungibility: Anti-blackness in neoliberal times. Journal of Gender Studies, 29(1), 102-112. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2019.1692193
World Health Organization. (2020). Global research on coronavirus disease (COVID-19). https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/global-research-on-novel-coronavirus-2019-ncov
Wuest, J. (2020, April 16). The state of biopower in the age of coronavirus. Debates. http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-state-of-biopower-in-the-age-of-the-coronavirus/
Yakaboski, T. and Perozzi, B. (2018). Internationalizing US student affairs practice: An intercultural and inclusive framework. Routledge.
Zapp, M. and Lerch, J. C. (2020). Imagining the world: Conceptions and determinants of internationalization in higher education curricula worldwide. Sociology of Education, 93(4), 372-392. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038040720929304
Zembylas, M. (2020). Necropolitics and sentimentality in education: The ethical, political and pedagogical implications of “making live and letting die” in the current political climate. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2020.17447108
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
Categories
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
All published articles are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 Unported License.
