Geographies of international academic mobility: Globalization and discourses of internationalization

Abstract

This article presents a review of the literature about geographies of international academic mobility, with a systematical analysis of 61 published works on the subject. It uses as categories of analysis three geographic constructs that are particularly useful for studies about imaginaries of internationalization: globalization, limit/boundary and geographic scale. The results are presented and discussed gathering them in three different groups; an optimistic perspective on academic mobility, a critical perspective that denounces and demonstrates the contradictions of the process, and a postmodern approach that questions the fixed assumptions that operate in the understandings of students in motion. The author concludes that the scale statements promoted by discourses of international academic mobility act by producing asymmetric spaces in the geopolitics of global knowledge.