The Challenges of Studying the African Diasporas

No Abstrac

Field of Higher Education Research, Africa

Initiated and funded by international organisations and non-African funders, the field of African HE research was largely shaped outside the continent over the past five decades. A bibliographic search carried out for this project using Scopus, Goggle Scholar and AJOL (African Journals Online) revealed that with the exception of South Africa, the institutionalisation of HER in African universities did not begin until the late 1990s despite growing numbers of publications, reports and pamphlets on the subject from the 1980s. Our focus in this chapter is on this process of institutionalisation and development of a field on the continent. Research produced outside Africa is also reported, but only for its structuring impact on HER on the continent

Moving from interdisciplinary research to transdisciplinary educational ethics : Bridging epistemological differences in researching higher education internationalization(s)

This article begins with the proposition that inter- and transdisciplinarity offer an important methodological grounding for collaborative HE research addressing complex agendas such as HE internationalization. Internationalization acts as a figure for the ‘troubled’ nature of higher education; hence we begin with the larger problem, discussing the current crises of disciplinary knowledge as the background question. We set out a framework for understanding and conceptualizing inter- and transdisciplinarity as a meta-theoretical approach that problematizes reductive and disciplinary approaches, in favour of research and analytical strategies which can work with, and across, differences. To work further through and operationalize different possibilities offered by inter-and transdisciplinary approaches to HE internationalizations, we discuss the use of tools such as social cartography to do ‘bridging work’ across different disciplinary and theoretical backgrounds and contexts. A non-formal practitioner–collaborator project is discussed to highlight emergent dimensions of collaboration that might otherwise be overlooked. Inter- and transdisciplinarity are not pre-specified specialized ‘methods’ but, rather, are orientations that may take reductive, convergent, divergent or emergent pathways. Inter- and transdisciplinarity can perhaps be best treated as a problematizing and open-ended methodological approach that foregrounds plurality and contestation, orienting research frameworks towards inclusiveness, tensions, unpredictability and complexity.EIHE (Ethical Internationalisation in times of crises