(Un)Making knowledge: towards cognitive justice in international higher education

For several years now, critical perspectives on the development and current orientation of internationalisation have emerged, expressing concern about the risk of reproducing already uneven global hierarchies through mainstream internationalisation activities, particularly in institutions of the Global North and Western/ised higher education. Scholars and practitioners caution that as institutions grow more interconnected, without a redistribution of power or a reimagining of dominant relationships, longstanding inequalities may be further entrenched. There is increasing concern that prevailing approaches to internationalisation risk reinforcing colonialist, capitalist global relations and sustaining Eurocentric knowledge regimes. Drawing on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork across the UK, Denmark, and Germany, I examine how international student mobility is embedded in wider struggles over knowledge, legitimacy, and global inequality. The research traces how dominant hierarchies are reproduced or unsettled through everyday practices within universities, as well as in broader policy, institutional, and social spaces. Attending to both structural conditions and lived experiences, the study explores how spatial associations of knowledge and global power relations are articulated through everyday interactions, educational practices, and ways of knowing. It ultimately argues for a more ethically engaged and politically reflexive approach to internationalisation – one that takes seriously the call for cognitive justice in global higher education.