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- Convenors:
-
Sophia Thubauville
(Frobenius Institute)
Alexandra Samokhvalova (Goethe-University Frankfurt )
Frauke Katharina Eckl
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- KH115
- Start time:
- 30 June, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Zurich
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
The panel focuses on the expanding higher education sectors in African countries which go along with economic, cultural and social change. These developments cannot be observed as isolated phenomena, but instead must be investigated in a transnational perspective.
Long Abstract:
African countries face an impressive urbanization rate of 3.5%. This trend poses fundamental challenges regarding infrastructures on the social, cultural and economic level. Especially higher education is supposed to tackle this development in many different ways. Therefore, many countries on the continent, like Ethiopia or Tanzania, have recently expanded or plan to expand their higher education system massively in the next few years, to accompany these economic, cultural and social changes in the urban and rural regions. Newly established institutes of higher education are seen as hubs of innovation and flagship universities are supposed to precede in propelling economic growth.
Increasingly important in the expansion of the higher education sector in African countries are entanglements with actors from other countries and regions, ranging from discourses and advice on the policy level over bilateral programs to the opening of foreign colleges and universities on the continent. Furthermore, the migration of students and academic staff in the higher education sector between African countries and countries outside of Africa is increasing at a rapid pace. This trend of transnational exchange and mobility in higher education raises fundamental questions about quality of education, competition for the best talent, and research cultures.
The panel welcomes contributions from different disciplines and interdisciplinary perspectives, with a focus on empirical findings and case studies, but also theoretical implications.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
By focusing on the case of a Malaysian private university’s branch campuses in Africa, this paper explores the potential benefits and risks of foreign branch campuses on the continent and discusses the shift of transnational higher education landscape from the global north to south.
Paper long abstract:
Transnational higher education (TNHE) has been growing rapidly, bringing with it high hopes and expectations of benefits for institutions in the countries of origin and destination. With its rapid economic development, high population growth and resulting increase in demand for quality higher education, Africa is becoming an emerging market for cross-border higher education activities, including international branch campuses. This paper explores the case of a Malaysian university's branch campuses in African countries. Being the only non-African institution with branch campuses in more than one country on the continent, Limkokwing University of Creative Technology constitutes a special but almost completely unexplored phenomenon.
First, the paper identifies the main rationale and objectives driving a Malaysian university to enter African market, and its current scope of activities on the continent. Second, it focuses on the impact of Limkokwing branch campuses for receiving countries in Africa. The findings of this paper highlight the importance of a national TNHE regulatory framework and institutional level policies, which will ensure the quality of international branch campuses and relevance of the offered education to local needs and priorities. Additionally, the paper urges future research to look closer at the cases of Malaysia and other Asian countries that are "branching out" to set up campuses in Africa, and by doing so shifting the transnational higher education landscape from the global north to south.
Paper short abstract:
At the crossroads of economic sociology, and migration studies, this contribution explores the drivers and implications of this surge in African migration to Turkey, through a combination of quantitative, administrative, and qualitative data.
Paper long abstract:
Talents are on the move. Mobility is at the core of the evolution of higher education: Already 4.5 million tertiary individuals study outside their country of citizenship and African students make up for the most mobile student population in the world with a mobility rate of 6 percent.
The race to attract "the best and the brightest" shapes tomorrow's knowledge economy - and suggests that South-South mobility will play a key role, as the case of Turkey illustrates. Indeed Turkey shifted from an emigration country (through the 2000's) to an immigration country in 2013 - a surge largely driven by the unparalleled number of African students now seeking Turkish degrees (a number that increased more than 7 fold between 2006 and 2013 ).
At the crossroads of economic sociology, and migration studies, this contribution explores the drivers and implications of this surge in African migration to Turkey, through a combination of quantitative, administrative, and qualitative data.
Paper short abstract:
By assessing the violence faced by African students in India, this paper will reveal the aspirations and hopes that structure African engagements in South-South higher education, as well as their cultural investments in a modernity that does not necessitate relocating to Europe or North America.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will consider the spate of attacks on African students in India between 2010 and 2016. Focusing particularly on the violence of 2016, it will argue that the recent attacks must be understood in terms of the history of African groups in India and, in particular, the politics of race and of 'blackness' in Indian society. By situating the anti-African racism within Indian culture, this paper will argue that we in order to understand the predicament of Africans in India, we need to understand the visions of place and hopes for the future that motivate students to seek a new future in India. In doing so, the paper will contribute to our understanding of African minorities within Indian Higher Education, as well as the variety of African contributions to contemporary South Asia, and the history of South-South global encounters.
Paper short abstract:
The paper wants to reconstruct the history of Indian educators in Ethiopia and inquire the historical as well as individual reasons why they moved and still move to the African country.
Paper long abstract:
The history of Indians in Ethiopia is much different from the history of Indians in the rest of the continent, especially the rest of East Africa. While in other East African countries Indians were predominantly dukawalla, traders, who had followed the Arab trading routes, in Ethiopia Indians have been closely associated with formal education since the times of Emperor Haile Selassie. When secondary schools were established in the 1940s, Haile Selassie had not only Indian advisors, but Indian teachers arrived in large numbers. Around six decades later, when a similar fast expansion took place in the higher education sector, Ethiopia turned again to India as one of the possible source countries for recruiting university lecturers. While the employment of academics from other contemplated countries like Cuba and Nigeria stayed low for various reasons, Indian academics were ready to come and today they still arrive in large numbers.
The paper wants to reconstruct the history of Indian educators in Ethiopia and inquire the historical as well as individual reasons why they moved to the African country.
Paper short abstract:
Urban growth, climatic and cultural shifts, and transfers of knowledge and technology have repositioned African agents of development around improvement in standards of living and structures of opportunity. Integral to these trends is a continent-wide effort to transform Architectural Education.
Paper long abstract:
Architecture schools and practicing architects are acutely aware of their role in educating students along with citizens, government officials, donors, and investors about the importance of the built environment in relation to development ideals. These efforts increasingly draw attention to the merits and possibilities of popular and vernacular architectures, community participation, and the
mobilization of indigenous materials, construction techniques and design-solutions to enhance and enable development outcomes. These are not inward-looking, strictly nationalist or nativist agendas, rather, they are bound-up with highly cosmopolitan networks of personnel, plans, funds, and fabrication techniques.
Architecture schools and practitioners are likewise engaged in a pan-African conversation to create methods and curricula appropriate to future needs and common challenges of artistic and aesthetic aspiration in a world where power and resources remain unevenly distributed. Though decidedly forward-looking, today's architectural engagements in Africa unfold against the backdrop of an earlier history of architecture-based development interventions, and the longer legacy of architecture as a field of practice by and for elites. Taking stock of this common heritage of European colonial and post-colonial influence and more recently, a host of Chinese-built and funded architectural projects, architecture schools and professionals in Africa are now making a self-conscious
move in a new direction attuned to the promise of international partnerships yet driven by on-the-ground conditions and priorities and wary of the lingering positioning of Africa as laboratory for better endowed actors and institutions.
This paper reports a study of curricular transformation now in evidence in African Architecture programs in transition, with focus on Ethiopia and Rwanda.
Paper short abstract:
Education (incountry, abroad) has always been key to (re)production of African elites. Its evolution will be analysed by looking at enrolment rates in African countries, comparing them to Europe. How are elites broadening out? What does that mean for education? This will be looked at using Bourdieu.
Paper long abstract:
From Elite to Mass Education: where will the elite go to next? What happens at the level below?
Bourdieu defines education as a field, a system of social positions, structured internally in terms of power relations. Thus, questions of elite (re)production and internationalisation can be analysed using Bourdieu's approach. In addition, his concept of cultural capital is relevant for analysing inequalities in educational opportunity. Education and its habitus can be seen as one mechanism used for class reproduction in Africa. However, education also creates conditions for societal change.
The first part of the paper will briefly outline Bourdieu's framework. The second part examines the evolution in the educational pyramid in three countries of Sub-Saharan Africa: one near the average situation, one negative and one positive outlier, using available UNESCO enrolment statistics. It will touch on the transnational component of elite education, which has always been very relevant in Africa. It will compare data with the same statistics for three European countries. Following Bourdieu and Passeron (the Inheritors, 1979), the paper will argue that the evolution over time of the proportion of the population with access to education at different levels is relevant for analysing the social function of education and its role in elite reproduction.
The paper will end with brief considerations on the role of language in the future of education in Africa.
Paper short abstract:
Research capacity in higher education in Zambia faces numerous challenges, but there are several recent interventions working to alleviate issues and explore new opportunities. This paper examines the issues, interventions, and possible future work that can be done to promote capacity in Zambia.
Paper long abstract:
This paper builds on my personal experience in working for the Southern African Institute for Policy Research, an independent academic institute located in Lusaka, Zambia, which is dedicated to knowledge production and capacity building in research, publication, and documentation, including archival, library, and other resources. After completing my PhD fieldwork, affiliated to the University of Zambia, I stayed in the country to work and assisted in building several capacity building programs in Zambia, as well as regionally. My experiences, as well as those of my colleagues, will form the foundation of this paper, and will be supplemented by other studies, including some regional and continental comparisons.
Many of the challenges that Zambia faces in the promotion of higher education, research, and publishing are similar to counterparts in Africa as well as in the wider developing world. Teaching loads are high, research funding and support is minimal, and resources are limited. Zambia also faces more unique challenges, including a focus on donor driven research, policy, poor higher education policy development, and political disruptions.
It is the intention of this paper to consider not only the many issues and challenges that higher education, and specifically research capacity, in Zambia face, but also the interventions that have been taking place over the past several years and the new opportunities that exist for partnership and greater capacities, particularly as concerns new technologies.
Paper short abstract:
Dans un contexte de très forte diversification de l’offre éducative, de pénurie de places dans les établissements publics et de massification du supérieur, nous étudions, à partir des données des recensements de population, la question de la démocratisation qualitative des études au Sénégal
Paper long abstract:
Sur le continent africain, le nombre d'étudiants est passé de 200 000 en 1970 à 5 millions en 2014 selon la Banque Mondiale et les effectifs continuent de progresser de 9 % par an, deux fois plus vite que dans le reste du monde.
Cette augmentation rapide s'explique par la démographie des pays concernés et par le développement de la scolarisation au niveau secondaire.
Le Sénégal n'échappe pas à ce mouvement de massification du baccalauréat et de l'enseignement supérieur. Toutefois ces évolutions se produisent dans un contexte de très forte diversification de l'offre éducative et de pénurie généralisée de places dans les établissements publics générant une orientation parfois contrariée. En outre, rien ne garantit que l'accès à l'enseignement secondaire puis supérieur, plus massif à chaque génération, ait entrainé une baisse des inégalités entre les classes sociales dans un pays resté très élitiste.
Ces évolutions invitent à examiner la question de la réduction des inégalités sociales devant les études: le mouvement de démocratisation est-il de même ampleur à tous les niveaux du système supérieur ? Les inégalités n'ont-elles pas changé de nature pour désormais porter sur le type d'études suivies (établissements et filières) ? Et quid des inégalités filles-garçons à ce niveau ?
La compilation des différents recensements de population conduits au Sénégal (1988, 2002 et 2013) permet d'analyser les profils sociaux et familiaux des étudiants et le type d'établissement fréquenté et partant, l'évolution fine du lien entre origine sociale, sexe, diplôme et filières suivies sur longue période.
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on the notion of peace and the role of higher education in contributing to social and political development in Somaliland.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on the notion of peace and the role of higher education in contributing to social and political development in Somaliland, a self-proclaimed republic in the Horn of Africa. It draws upon a research-based capacity development project to discuss challenges of educational partnership, research and academic development. Issues around cultural disconnections, skepticism, different understanding of academic research and sensitivity around political identity are also identified. It is argued that Somaliland's clan-based social structure serves as a successful mechanism of conflict management and stability at the local level and most importantly, as a social deterrent to Southern influence of Al-Shabab but the very system is rather ambivalent about Western influences and neoliberal economic policies that seem to offer an opportunity for market reforms and foreign investment. The anxiety about the loss of stability as well as social and cultural erosion that may follow the enthused economic liberalisation faces the reality of persisted stagnation in providing basic services such as food, water, education, health and the infrastructure to Somalilanders. In this context, the higher education sector in Somaliland has a prominent role not only in economic development but also in preparing Somaliland for transformative democracy and sustainable peace that respond to new local and regional challenges. In order to nurture peace in the Somali region, more attention is needed in the development of higher education that produces critically conscious citizenry that is able to deal with threats to peace in the Somali region by addressing economic, political and social challenges.