Transnational academic mobility and knowledge creation: a critical reflection on interculturality and (de)coloniality

My presentation takes a critical stance at the relationship between intercultural experience, epistemic development and marketised higher education. It draws on my SRHE funded research (2011-12) outcomes. The initial proposition is that an important way to see the processes of academic mobility and the ways in which mobility is entwined with knowledge creation is through different types of knowledge, as ‘capital’. My research has examined the transfer and transformation of knowledge and the rise of ‘transnational identity capital’ (Kim, 2010) in the course, and as a result, of academic mobility and migration, drawing on both empirical and documentary research data - 35 selected interviews with contemporary mobile academics (including former doctoral students) as well as published (auto)biographies of well-known transnational academic intellectuals in the UK, Europe and elsewhere. My broader aim in this research is to offer a critical analysis of unequal power relations embedded in the process of forming and shaping new knowledge and identity capital among mobile academics in universities. It highlights the global-local knowledge nexus, through which interculturality is enmeshed with (de)coloniality. It further explores the possibility of intercultural dialogue of ‘knowledge’ in higher education to reconcile the epistemic division (between Wissenschaften and Weltanschauungen) and concludes with its implication for global social justice.