Paper short abstract:

The research is based on an ongoing multi-sited ethnography conducted by the author in social science departments at universities in Denmark and Sweden. It analyzes the structural and the agency elements of local practices of academic staff in the context of internationalization higher education.

Paper long abstract:

The study aims to shed light onto how the global pressures to internationalize higher education, due to the liberalization of the welfare state, increasing migration flows, and the decreasing public spending on education, affect the reproduction and, in some cases, the critical reformulation of roles of social scientists employed as academic staff.

One of the challenges of internationalization today is the mounting pressure on academics that results from the pressures on universities to recruit large numbers of students as a response to European and national policy requirements to widen participation to higher education. This process is nonetheless taking place without a matching allocation of resources to universities to manage diversity and to an increasing teaching and ad-hoc diversity-coaching load on the employed academics. At the same time, there is an increased pressure and anxiety on the same individuals to produce and publish new research in order not to 'perish' as academics.

This research is intended as a comparative institutional ethnography of practices of academic staff based on participant observation and interviews at sampled international departments at universities in Denmark and Sweden, two countries that exemplify the Scandinavian welfare state. The selected departments are understood as institutions embedded in national, regional and global structural contexts, and, in the same time, as locations in which social and scientific/critical practices are reproduced and, sometimes, reconstituted as forms of agency.