Racialized bodies, pliable minds: ethnography on the fringe of transnational education

Through ethnographic research, this paper explores narratives of failure constructed within a private Australian accounting college in China. The accounts provided by teachers and students are problematized in order to address how racialization is enacted through accounts of failure within the research site. Through an interpretive theoretical framework and the methodology of Michael Burawoy, racialization is exposed as a form of justification for the concerns teachers and students faced. Within accounts of failure, racial framing of the body and the acculturated minds of students were simultaneously ascribed negative attributes deemed in contradiction with this form of transnational education. In unpacking how these processes of racialization are tied to the very structure of transnational education itself, this paper addresses how standardized and globalized curricula produce unintended local effects.

[1]  Min-Zhan Lu,et al.  Professing Multiculturalism: The Politics of Style in the Contact Zone , 1994, College Composition & Communication.

[2]  M. Foucault,et al.  Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault , 1988 .

[3]  R. Morrow.  Foreword- Critical Theory, Globalization, and Higher Education: Political Economy and the Cul-de-Sac of the Postmodernist Cultural Turn , 2005, The University, State, and Market.

[4]  M. Kwiek.  The Nation-State, Globalisation and the Modern Institution of the University , 2000 .

[5]  Homi K. Bhabha.  The Location of Culture , 1994 .

[6]  Stephanie Lewthwaite.  Racialized Bodies , 2006, Reviews in American history.

[7]  A. Bryan,et al.  The promise and peril of education: the teaching of in/tolerance in an era of globalisation , 2005 .

[8]  S. Tomlinson.  Globalization, Race and Education: Continuity and Change , 2003 .

[9]  Qin Wen,et al.  Knowledge and Education as International Commodities: The Collapse of the Common Good , 2003 .

[10]  L. Floridi.  Technologies of the Self , 2012, Philosophy & Technology.

[11]  D. Woodhouse.  The Quality of Transnational Education: A provider view , 2006 .

[12]  J. Pearce,et al.  Guanxi: Connections As Substitutes for Formal Institutional Support , 1996 .

[13]  D. Olcott.  Global Connections to Global Partnerships: Navigating the Changing Landscape of Internationalism and Cross-Border Higher Education , 2009 .

[14]  E. Loyer.  On Linguistic Imperialism , 2016 .

[15]  M. Burawoy.  The Extended Case Method* , 1998 .

[16]  J. Kenway,et al.  Self-representations of International Women Postgraduate Students in the Global University 'Contact Zone' , 2003 .

[17]  C. Torres.  Democracy, Education, and Multiculturalism: Dilemmas of Citizenship in a Global World , 1998, Comparative Education Review.

[18]  Parlo Singh,et al.  Global Cultural Flows and Pedagogic Dilemmas: Teaching in the Global University Contact Zone , 2004 .

[19]  Christopher Ziguras,et al.  Transnational Education: Issues and Trends in Offshore Higher Education , 2006 .

[20]  C. Torres,et al.  The university, state, and market : the political economy of globalization in the Americas , 2006 .

[21]  F. Collins.  Making Asian students, making students Asian: The racialisation of export education in Auckland, New Zealand , 2006 .

[22]  P. Altbach.  GLOBALIZATION AND THE UNIVERSITY: MYTHS AND REALITIES IN AN UNEQUAL WORLD , 2004 .

[23]  Philip G. Altbach,et al.  Higher Education Crosses Borders: Can the United States Remain the Top Destination for Foreign Students? , 2004 .

[24]  Jason E. Lane.  Importing Private Higher Education: International Branch Campuses , 2011 .

[25]  T. Titchkosky.  "To Pee or not to Pee"? Ordinary Talk about Extraordinary Exclusions in a University Environment , 2008 .

[26]  Nicholas C. Burbules,et al.  Globalization and Education: Critical Perspectives , 2000 .

[27]  T. Lewis,et al.  Education and Event: Thinking Radical Pedagogy in the Era of Standardization , 2005 .