Paper-work: what module guides have to say about assessment practices

Documents are usually circulated as carriers of transparent information. They can serve as evidence of accountability. In fact, they embody the most desired value of managerialism, where the culture of audit and compliance is fully served and delivered in written and textual form. This article explores assessment by attending to its principal instrument – the document – through which it is organised, monitored and implemented in higher education. It is an invitation to ‘see’ what documents, such as, module guides, ‘do’ for universities and the assessment practices of academics. Under close scrutiny, documents ‘do’ more than record and transfer information. Their associated paper-work expresses and reproduces norms, patterns of thoughts and work habits that are accepted and assumed to be shared in the prevailing outcome-based assessment systems of higher education. This article provides a critical account based on practice-oriented and material-semiotic approaches to assessment. It bears witness to the past and persistent norms and standards that are shaped by documents, paper-work, control, compliance and surveillance and less by pedagogical and student engagement

Borders of Time: The temporalities of academic mobility

This article challenges the claim that highly skilled international academics who have obtained advanced degrees and transnational identities are offered almost seamless mobility. The state border or territory is not the only line that highly skilled academics must cross as international subjects of mobility. They experience a range of insecurities to do with their immigration status. This includes, but is not limited to, the waiting and processing times associated with immigration rules and visa requirements, which could temporarily suspend mobility rights. The notion of a temporal border is enacted to explore the insecurities that highly skilled academics face. Border crossing for highly skilled migrants is not just a matter of entry passing through territorial lines of nation-states. The border has a ‘thickness’ that stretches through time. Simply put, it takes time to fully cross borders

Rhythms of Academic Mobility

Academic mobility has been discursively circulated in at least two ways: as the cause of transnational identity capital and as the resource for knowledge transfer worldwide. Instead of a preoccupation with neoliberalist and human capital accounts, this article offers a rhythmic perspective and analysis that shifts the matter of academic mobility away from a purely discursive frame of reference. It explores the rhythms of a mobile and migrant academic in an auto-ethnographic and everyday account of human-body encounters. It engages with the unintended realities of the body as the border, especially when it comes to ethnicity and place of origin

Pedagogy of Academic Mobility

This chapter proposes the concept of ‘other thinking’ where otherness is positioned from within, instead of outside or opposite the dominant culture or host nation. Drawing from critical pedagogy and place-based approaches, it considers how academic mobility itself is a process of othering. In this autobiographic account, I explore otherness through the ‘eyes of the beholder’, while problematizing the monoracial tendency to impose identity and status based on my place of origin and ethnicity. To do this, the pedagogy I attend to refers to the process of (un)becoming the other by transgressing the binary logic of the neocolonial forces of globalization and immigration. It argues for the need to decolonize the focus of pedagogy from the globalized theoretical discourses of the corporate university to the particular lived experience or experiential dimension of critical pedagogy. I have become a neo-liberal and colonized subject as a non-EU/UK migrant academic. I could not escape the prescribed consciousness of the West and the coloniality of my being. However, I can replace and move my identity to an ‘other’ within. Such boundary-making could become a ‘subject matter’ to replace and reposition various disciplinary perspectives and discourses of educational research and practice