The Future of Cross-Border Academic Mobility and Immobility: Power, Knowledge and Agency
By (Author) Aline Courtois
Edited by Professor Simon Marginson
Edited by Catherine Montgomery
Edited by Ravinder Sidhu
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Bloomsbury Academic
11th December 2025
United Kingdom
Professional and Scholarly
Non Fiction
Hardback
336
Width 156mm, Height 234mm
This open access edited collection brings together reflections on the fast-changing and crisis-ridden global context and develops new ways of conceptualising academic mobilities, and immobilities, against a backdrop of a conflicted and precarious future for global higher education. The result is a set of vivid cutting-edge contributions, some of which take a global view and others which explore a country perspective, including China, France, Malaysia, Philippines, Spain, Thailand, Turkey, Vietnam, and more.
The book foregrounds critical approaches to academic mobility, with topics covered including blockages to mobility in the context of geopolitical tensions and the upsurge of national particularism and nativism, the intersection of academic (im)mobilities and power, political subjectivities and race, class and gender. Traditional understandings of academic mobility as physical mobility from global South to North are questioned as exclusionary and alternative models of mobility are offered. These include those appropriate to post-colonial national and regional contexts, those responsive to the changing needs of students, academics and their communities, those using online modes as well as those involving physical transfers of persons, and those about the mobility of knowledge as well as people and learning.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by UKRI.
Aline Courtois is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Education at the University of Bath, UK.
Simon Marginson is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Oxford, Director of the ESRC/RE Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE), and Joint Editor-in-Chief of Higher Education.
Catherine Montgomery is Professor of Education and Deputy Executive Dean Global at Durham University, UK. Catherine is Editor for Compare: Journal of International and Comparative Education.
Ravinder Sidhu is Associate Professor of Education in the School of Education at the University of Queensland, Australia.