Decolonizing Higher Education and Student Mobilities from the Global South

Abstract Submissions Closed

RC04 Sociology of Education (host committee)

Language: English

Session Type: Oral

The internationalization of higher education has transformed universities into key sites of global mobility, knowledge production, and social change. International student mobility is frequently portrayed as a pathway to opportunity, social mobility, and global citizenship. However, these processes remain deeply embedded in unequal global relations shaped by colonial legacies, epistemic hierarchies, and structural inequalities.

Recent debates on decolonizing higher education have emphasized the need to critically examine whose ways of knowing continue to shape and dominate existing theories, policies, methodologies, and institutional practices (Shahjahan et al., 2021). At the same time, scholarship has shown that the internationalization of higher education remains embedded in unequal global relations of knowledge production, in which Western paradigms continue to shape whose knowledge is recognized, legitimized, and circulated (Kofman, 2020; Bauschke-Urban & Dedgjoni, 2025).

This session explores how student mobilities from the Global South reveal, negotiate, and challenge global hierarchies of knowledge, race, class, gender, citizenship, language, and geopolitical power. By bringing together decolonial perspectives and empirical research on international student mobility, the session foregrounds voices and experiences often marginalized in dominant narratives of internationalization and fosters critical reflection on the role of higher education in reproducing or transforming global inequalities. The session welcomes topics including:

  • Decolonizing higher education and knowledge production
  • Student mobilities from the Global South
  • Internationalization, migration, and global inequalities
  • Epistemic justice and Global South perspectives
  • Colonial legacies in higher education
  • South-South and multidirectional mobilities
  • Race, class, gender, and citizenship across student mobility trajectories
  • Belonging, identity, and transnational educational experiences
Session Organizers:
Carola BAUSCHKE-URBAN, Fulda University of Applied Sciences, Germany, carola.bauschke-urban@sk.hs-fulda.de
Dorina DEDGJONI, Fulda University of Applied Sciences, Germany, dorina.dedgjoni@sk.hs-fulda.de
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