Research on international and global higher education: Six different perspectives

The international and global dimension of higher education continues to expand in an increasingly inter-dependent and connected world, notwithstanding geo-political tensions and conflicts. There are several different strands of research and scholarship in relation to international and global phenomena. Each has distinctive perspectives, methods, and concerns; issues that it seeks to investigate, understand, and explain; and often, policies and practices that it wants to develop and change. These strands of thought can be summarised as follows: comparative higher education, higher education and international development, post-colonial studies of higher education, global higher education studies, and studies of international education mobility. This Special Issue of Oxford Review of Education adds a further strand, one not prominent in the English-language literature but longstanding and influential in China, the perspective of thinking through the world (tianxia). Each of these strands is the starting point for one of the six articles in the Special Issue. The introduction compares the approaches taken in the six articles to matters of geo-spatiality, ethics and values, and relations of power. It also discusses how each perspective sees the other perspectives; and their respective suggestions about the future development of research and scholarship in relation to international and global higher education.