Internationalisation and the Next Generation of Social Scientists

Internationalisation and the next generation of social scientists:

Experiences of early career academics from sub-saharan Africa

Oxford CETL Network Research Project June 2010

Final Report and Policy Recommendations

David Mills, Melody Cox, Jingjing Zhang, Nick Hopwood, Lynn McAlpine

Introduction

During the last decade, the UK social sciences have recruited significant numbers of doctoral students and post-doctoral research staff from beyond Britain. The market-led nature of postgraduate education and growing levels of student mobility have together contributed to an increasingly cosmopolitan community of early career researchers. Accompanying this has been a growing educational literature on ‘international’ doctoral students and the challenges they face on ‘adapting’ to ‘host’ academic cultures. However the category ‘international’ itself risks homogenising a hugely diverse student body, presuming that a distinct group of international students exist with shared experiences and challenges. A moment’s thought helps one realises that a wealthy Kenyan-American who has studied at Harvard and travelled extensively experiences UK university life very differently from a Ugandan postgraduate on a scholarship with no prior international experience. Developing the social and academic networks thjat support a successful doctoral trajectory is a challenge for all students, no matter what their nationality orindividual biography.

Can one even generalise about the challenges facing students coming from one part of the world? Or even about the experiences of South Saharan African nationals studying aspostgraduates in Oxford. There has been much public discussion of the economic constraints facing public universities in Africa, and the resultant ‘brain-drain’. Yet there has been less attention to the networks through which research students deal with the internationalisation of academic environments and negotiate an increasingly transnational academy and global research economy. How relevant is UK academic practice for their own career strategies and futures, whether in universities or social research, either in Africa or internationally? This research allows us to understand students as individuals dependent on multiple networks, moving though multiple contexts (academia, activism, consultancy), and developing multiple identities

This research is funded by the Oxford University Centre of Excellence in Preparation for Academic Practice, a HEFCE-funded CETL tasked with helping doctoral students and early career researchers understand the challenges, pressures and rewards of academic work, with a particular focus on teaching practice. It extends and nuances the findings of an existing ‘The Next Generation of Social Scientists’ (NGSS) project that explored experiences of academic practice amongst social science doctoral students (see Hopwood et al 2009). Whilst NGSS did not foreground the challenges faced by international students, up to 40% of its respondents - a percentage typical in many research universities today -did not hold UK nationality. As a result, many of of the NGSS project’s findings are applicable to students from South Saharan Africa, and vice-versa.

In order to address our concern about scholarly generalisations around the doctoral experience, this research project explored the academic biographies, doctoral experiences and career visions of sub-saharan African students coming to study in OxfordWe highlight the diversity within this group, but also explore what, if anything, seems to be distinctive or shared in their experiences of ‘academic practice’ . We make no apologies for a case-study primarily focused on Oxford students (supplemented with national-level data sets from HESA and ISB, and interviews with senior academics), partly because Oxford continues to train a significant number of African academics, but also because this ensures a single institutional context.

Whilst the overall number of UK doctoral students has remained relatively steady, there has been a 70% growth in the number of doctoral students from sub-Saharan Africa studying in the UK over the last 8 years, to a current figure of around 3500 (HESA 2006/7). A few universities – including Oxford, Nottingham, Birmingham, London and Edinburgh – have significant numbers of African research students. Because of its colonial intellectual links, not to mention the Rhodes foundation, Oxford continues to be a hub for a range of African and Africanist scholarship, with more such doctoral research students than most other UK universities, making it a valuable research case-study. During 2006, there were 55 full-time research students registered in Oxford from South Africa, and another 45 research students from other parts of sub-saharan Africa. Of these, up to half are social scientists.

Our research involved interviews with more than twenty African students studying a range of scoial sciences at Oxford, followed up by twofocus groups. We sought to document the range of their experiences of academic practice in the UK, how their narratives are shaped by their personal and institutional biographies, and whether their experiences are changing their career plans or their views about academic work. We also asked about their networks (social and intellectual) both in Africa and the UK. We complemented this with several interviews with senior staff within Oxford to garner their perspectives on the role that institutional histories and collaborations play in shaping academic practice.

We order our key findings and analysis into three broad sections. In the first we discuss the limits and challenges associated with labelling and categorising students. We then go on to describe students’ different experiences of Oxford and UK academic practice and the particular challenges of funding, pedagogy and community. Our final section explore how students conceptualised their futures and careers within the global research economy.

The thrust of this policy report is to question the value of a blanket category of ‘international students’. We argue instead for an understanding of the student biographies within particular institutions and the complex geopolitics of global higher education. Yes, an attentiveness to the higher education systems from which students come is vitally important for understanding the economic relationships structuring individual career choices and possibilities, but generic labels – such as ‘African students’ – can be misleading. On the other hand, we do not wish to deny or downplay all differences, as our interviews pointed to aspects of UK academic culture that the literature on international students has already highlighted as troubling (CITE?). Yet one also has to acknowledge the very adoption of the ‘international’ label can lead people into thinking about their expereince in certain predetermined ways.

We also seek to relativise and question the notion of ‘academic practice’. For all its breadth and flexibility as a concept, scholars thinking of working in Africa have to plan and negotiate a future that extends far beyond the university as a career setting. Academics may, for example, spend most of their time doing consultancy work. This, we suggest, limits the validity of the term in an African context. Current understandings of ‘academic practice’ may needs to be rethought for universities in the global South.

Finally, we highlight the particular way in which these students understand the relationship between universities and society, and the contributions they imagine making through an engaged applied scholarship that seeks to work for the social good. Whilst making a difference and doing good’ were themes that emerged from the NGSS study, these students conceptualised this role in relation to the developing world societies with which they are linked.

What is already known about this topic

Scholars in the developing world have written extensively of the global hierarchies, centre-periphery relations and colonial legacies that structure disciplinary knowledge production in the social sciences (eg Schott 1998, Alatas 2003, Ntarangwi , Mills and Babiker 2006). Rather than promoting a global academic ‘commons’, the transnational migration of students and scholars can also perpetuate academic hierarchies and inequalities. Since independence, many African scholars at Oxford have largely depended on colonial academic networks and Western donors for studentships (such as Commonwealth scholarships and Rhodes scholarships), research funds and publication opportunities. Today, despite the growth of African higher education, the limited resaerch capacity and funding available to many universities recreates this dependency in new ways.

Recent research on internationaleducation shows that…

Findings

1) Rethinking the category of ‘International students’

Our research highlights the limits of the ‘international students’ category. Whilst the experiences of students themselves are clearly shaped by their personal histories and provenance, this does not mean that these will be the most important factor influencing their university experience in the UK. By a similar logic, being a student may also not be the defining aspect of their identity. Even students from the same country will have very different life experiences, educational experiences and career futures. The greater awareness of. for example, financial concerns amongst Africa students may create an illusion that this is a shared experience, whereas some of our participantscome from wealthy and cosmopolitan families. these categories make blurred spectrums into rigid boundaries. For example, the bureaucratic practice of classifying students as ‘home’, ‘EU’ or ‘international’ for fee purposes highlights the clumsy power of state identities, Anyone with joint nationality will strategically define themselves as European, hiding the true levels of mobility and Africanity within the student population.

The parallels between UK and non-UK students’ experiences of difficulties make us cautious about defining these in terms of – and ascribing them to - a student’s nationality. The following comment from one student questioned a simplistic model of cultural exchange:

We’re all in a university, an academic community, okay? You are there to do things like research, you know, read, you know, write and all that, and to that extent, there was not any cultural exchanges. We are not African or American or Chinese or…Welsh or anything; we are all academics and we interact quite happily. After every seminar, we would go to the pub.

However, our interviews also highlight how some obstacles may be experienced by ‘international’ students as a consequence of their ascribed international status, when in fact they are prevalent among many students. Any analysis has to tread a delicate line between reifying and denying difference. In what follows, we highlight the diversity of our respondents’ views about finance, identity and pedagogy whilst studying in the UK – themes that are often essentialised as core to the international student experience.

Financing doctoral study

We initially considered dividing our respondents into different categories, based on their different financial and personal backgrounds. Some had highly cosmopolitan networks and biographies, whilst others were coming directly from African universities, sometimes as scholarship students. Yet nearly every student discussed the financial pressures they faced upon coming to oxford and the UK, especially those without a scholarship. Often they compared their fortunes with US-based colleagues:

I was looking around for places to do my D.Phil. or PhD, whichever, and Oxford obviously was still in the back of my mind, but it seemed a long shot because I mean funding here seems very tricky, in the UK generally, for students from Africa. In America, it seems easier because, you know, once you get in the system, there is funding for you.

And then the other big challenge of course is that there’s no way of knowing whether one’s going to get the funding to continue or not, when you’re not coming from the UK, and so you are competing for a very small pool of resources with hundreds, if not thousands, of other students. That’s really another anxiety that you have to carry with you all the time, and that I think puts undue pressure on how one tackles the work and understands it and so on.

Secondary education in Africa is only available to a privileged minority, and scholarships are not always distributed on grounds of merit, so it did not necessarily follow that ‘scholarship students’ made up a distinct category.

I think that there’s more funding to go to the UK, in Zambia anyway, at least when I was looking, but that was six years ago, so I’m not sure if things are different now. But the other problem in Zambia is funding can not be very transparent. I don’t know if you know what I mean. When I was doing it, there was a lot of reported nepotism.

Nor were all students coming out of an undergraduate programme: a number had experience as lecturers in African universities, or had left postgraduate programmes in African universities to come to the UK:

Actually, prior to coming to Oxford, I had actually started a PhD programme in Nigeria, but given my work, I didn’t have the time to do the kind of fieldwork and all those stuff, and so that is why, when I had the opportunity for Oxford, I actually left that programme….I was the only exception, the only one here on a scholarship. Every other person that was here at the time was here because their parents were rich and could afford it.

Insert the quote re: a student abandoning their Masters’ degree in African university for Oxford

Others came to the UK having worked in the US or elsewhere. As one Masters student noted: “I left for the US for my bachelor’s and Master’s, and then stayed on to work in New York, and then when I was ready for a doctorate, I applied to Oxford, and then I thought to do a Master’s first”. There were marked wealth divides amongst students, but these did not necessarily connect to particular attitudes or value systems or views about returning home.

Identity

We have argued for the limitations of a literature on ‘international students’ that does not ground itself in an understanding of the lived experiences that structure their experience today. Too often, this debate is framed in terms of a collision of cultures. Of course, some of our respondents talked of England as being ‘far from home’; ‘very culturally alienating’, and their ‘crazy experiences of trying to make sense of it’. But to simply read this through a culturalist lens over-simplifies a complicated dynamic. A key aspect of this has to be the racialisation of difference. Research into discrimination felt by ‘international’ students (Marginson 2010) has begun to highlight this issue. Many of the students we interviewed highlighted the challenges of being confronted with difference in their classrooms and in their course curriculum as they worked within a European intellectual tradition and approach to studying African issues.

And the people I was with, the African Studies Department was very friendly. It took a while in the beginning to settle in and really…it’s very different studying here as opposed to studying in Africa. For instance, you’re in the racial minority, and it’s very different how you speak about Africa. It’s a very different discussion, and it’s a different way of studying, so I had to adjust to that as well, and it took a while - like you almost feel like you’re walking on eggshells.

Experiences of exclusion and inclusion are not limited to international students. In a university like Oxford, where international students make up almost 60% of graduate students, it can be the UK students who are marginalized, and wealthy ‘cosmopolitan’ students who create the ‘in-crowd’.

It is more than a century since W E DuBois wrote powerfully about the dislocating experience of ‘double consciousness’ felt by many African Americans. Yet this sense of having to negotiate two very different identities - as a research student and an African - was echoed by a number of our respondents. One studentcaptured this tension eloquently:

I’m in two places: I’m an Oxford student in England, and that comes with its own sort of expectations; but I’m also a Zambian, a son, which comes with its own expectations back home and everything. But I also need to feel grounded, as a Zambian and a person and everything, so there’s also friends from my cultural background, from Zambia and cousins/relatives who live in the UK …I’m in the UK, but this is just for my education, but I still belong…

He rejected the too-easy espousal of a cosmopolitan scholarly identity:

It’s that whole question again of negotiating and navigating, because they are two different places and two different sort of cultural spaces… The need to be grounded, for me, is the most important thing. I haven’t quite yet sort of mastered how to be a sort of trans-national person and sort of not identify with a place…For me, I think my identity still comes from a place and a particular culture that I come from, and I feel grounded if I can still meaningfully engage and be part of that community.

Yet this still left him worrying about how he would be seen on his return

Because, when you get home, the jokes, “Oh, he’s in Britain!” [laughing] so you…it’s the small things that sort of mark you out …you still want to fit in ….it’s almost as if, consciously, you’re trying to sort of avoid those kind of things, the traits that mark you out or something like that, but it’s trying to…not apologise for being, you know, here, but it’s…it’s crazy!