‘Education Cities’ to Transnational Education Zones

Co-authors, but non-presenting: Alice Bobée, Tim Rottleb, Marc Schulze

One curious feature of the marketization and internationalisation of higher education has been the rise of offshore campuses: physical presences of higher education institutions in another country, offering international degrees in the name of the foreign higher education provider. Governments have actively tried to attract these transnational education providers in a quest to become “international education hubs” or “education cities” that are deemed vital for fostering the knowledge economy. In several countries, these efforts are characterised by multiple foreign higher education providers co-locating within a specific zone.

This webinar will take a deeper look at these projects around the world and analyse how universities become enrolled as transnational urban actors in the development and transformation of cities, in Malaysia, Korea, Qatar and Dubai. We suggest that the resulting spaces should be understood as “transnational education zones” and analyse these with respect to their embeddedness in state-led projects for the ‘knowledge economy’, their vision for transnational subject formation and their character as urban zones of exception. It is argued that we need to rethink city-university relations and understand the changing role of globalising higher education for urban and national economic development agendas.