Dr Lee Rensimer

The first (with Prof Tristan McCowan) investigated the international flows of ‘aid’ or funding to higher education systems, academics and students in the Global South. This project took stock of the publicly available data and their gaps, while also critically assessing the major practices and priorities of donors. The findings from this stream were recently published in CGHE working paper 97, which unsettles assumptions around international support to HE and offers a novel approach to conceptualising and empiricising aid flows.The second stream (with Prof Rachel Brooks) considers the role of organisational actors in articulating the European higher education space. This work examines actors’ varying perspectives on emerging university alliances formed through the European Universities Initiative as well as their responses to the Ukraine-Russia conflict, reflecting competing spatial imaginaries of Europe and of the borders and substance of its HE space. Findings from this stream have been published in one scholarly article with two more under review and one further output on European students forthcoming.