Spaces of (Non-)Belonging: Lived Experience of Academic Mobility in the Time of Shrinking Cosmopolitanism (original) (raw)

2021, Spaces of (Non-)Belonging: Lived Experience of Academic Mobility in the Time of Shrinking Cosmopolitanism

Academic mobility has been theorized in terms of internalization of knowledge, globalization and cosmopolitanism, as a means to foster similarities between systems and cultures of higher education, and to neutralize tensions between them, encouraging trust and promoting cooperation and exchange worldwide. As a Western social ideology, cosmopolitanism has stimulated global interconnectedness by creating conditions for a transnational mobility of people, goods, information, and knowledge. For the past several years, however, we have witnessed various forces emerge—such as the rise of conservative values nourishing populist, xenophobic, and separatist sentiments—that have radically challenged its social-political currency, questioning its ideological validity as a shared philosophy of communal growth. This has increasingly laid bare large-scale social-economic inequalities, and intensified political struggles between and within countries, all the while revealing major structural problems that considerably impact the process of international academic exchange and mobility. On the whole, this research project is configured as an exploration of the limits of cosmopolitanism within the contemporary, turbulent, geo-political context. Zooming in on my lived experience as a foreign mobile student, I aim to bring in and examine my own personal perspective in an autoethnographic and critical fashion. Heuristically, I will work with affect theory in order to elucidate my—spatially diversified and determined—experience of ‘non-belonging’ that this international environment has triggered. Consequently, and particularly, the main objective will be to critically account for my embodied entanglement with the spaces I have inhabited for the past one year and a half, analyzing the ways they have shaped my experience as an international mobile student. The project adapts a critical discourse analysis of selected (social) media communication of political events in Brazil, Poland, France and Spain that have influenced me the most over the course of my academic mobility period. Contributing to a personalized and (auto)critical account of my experience of academic mobility, this research project aspires to generate a new understanding of international academic mobility and the challenges this produces in the time of shrinking cosmopolitanism. Key words: academic mobility, affect, belonging, cosmopolitanism, space.