Mobile academic intellectuals and politics: space and time, affect and effect
- Terri Kim, University of East London
This seminar introduces ways to think about mobile academic intellectuals in the political contexts of space, time and affect and how they form a specific academic capitalism, which Dr Kim defines as a pariah academic capitalism.
Dr Kim considers transnational academic mobility as a spatial relationship between knowledge and identity. She argues that mobile academic intellectuals are pariahs carrying possibilities for creative destruction, innovation: they are permanent strangers often creating new knowledge.
Barriers of ethnicity, nationality, race, gender, religion and culture and the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion may alter as they move. In a phenomenological framework, Dr Kim reviews some distinctive examples of transnational mobile academic intellectuals across space and time and critiques the contemporary university contexts.
She will elaborate specific terms and conditions of ‘pariah academic capitalism’ (Kim, forthcoming) and discuss both political and epistemic implications, which can be significant given the disturbing flashes of ethnic chauvinism and divisive nationalism in the politics of the Brexit and Trump periods.
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Terri Kim (PhD London) is Reader in Comparative Higher Education at UEL, Honorary Senior Research Associate at the UCL Institute of Education, and a Principal Fellow of Higher Education Academy (PFHEA). Previously she was a visiting scholar in International Relations at LSE; visiting scholar at the Collège de France in Paris, and distinguished visiting scholar at Monash University in Melbourne. She is a co-convenor of the SRHE Policy Network; the Book Reviews Editor of Comparative Education; and a member of the Editorial Board of four major international journals. Her long-term (and ongoing) research has been on transnational academic mobility/migration, knowledge and identity capital. She is currently co-leading a Leadership Foundation for Higher Education (LFHE)-funded research project on ‘Tracking the Impact of BME Leadership Development Programme’ as a two-year longitudinal study.