In the market discourses of technological disruption, higher education institutions have routinely been positioned in deficit models and of anachronistic approaches to teaching at odds with the types ...of educational futures being presented by commercial organisations. Predominantly, automation technologies in the form of artificial intelligence are being promoted as the future of teaching. In this paper, on the other hand, we explore the prospects for using non-artificial intelligence automated agents in teaching and its impact on the teacher function at the University of Edinburgh. Through engagement with teachers, staff and students at the university, this research has identified use cases for bots, in what spaces they would be situated, and how they would supplement the teacher function. This paper argues that a community-driven approach combined with a sociomaterial conceptualisation can generate a shift from market discourses and to collaborative development of educational technologies.
Increasing migration across the world has transformed the politics of identity in recent decades, which has influenced how people experience and narrate ethnicity. The rigid Ethiopian political ...system of ethnic federalism makes ethnicity an official and permanent component of individual identity and group belonging to ethnic-based regions. At the same time, the government has enabled increased internal migration and facilitated ethnic diversity on university campuses. In this article, I explore experiences of migration across regional boundaries among people from the Tigray region towards ethnically diverse urban centers in Ethiopia, such as Addis Ababa. This paper illustrates how an emic conceptualisation of identity can be understood as a response to state categories of ethnicity, but also argues that contextual and temporal politics generate conditions and experiences that in turn reshape those conceptualisations.
The increasing interest in mobilities among social scientists over the past two decades has generated new research approaches to deepen the understanding of people's diverse movements. These methods ...have focused on capturing research participants' mobilities, but also led to new ways of thinking about researchers' mobilities as a strategy to collect data. In this paper, we explore the relationship between researchers and research participants' mobilities through the idea of 'following'. Drawing on insights from the Moving Marketplaces research project on eight markets in the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the UK, we highlight the lack of beginnings and endings of following. This leads us to a reflection on what to actually follow as well as an analysis of the doings of following. This paper examines some of the unexplored terrains in the conceptual and methodological debate around following and argues that it is essential to reflexively engage with the implications and practicalities of this approach. We argue that it is more productive to regard following not only as the physical process of following people, objects, knowledge, etc., but also as a theoretical and methodological openness that embraces and articulates the dynamic and non-linear character of ethnographic research practices.
There is now a large literature discussing how mobilities are part of contemporary everyday power geometries and is a resource to which people have unequal access. This body of work has, thus, ...valorised mobility as a desirable good. Why some people choose immobility and what has to be mobilised to enable this immobility has received much less attention. This paper draws on interviews with international distance education students in Namibia and Zimbabwe studying at the University of South Africa (UNISA) to explore the spatio-temporal underpinnings to why students choose to remain at home while studying abroad and how this is arranged. It outlines the infrastructures of reach that enable student immobility and how their incomplete nature means that students have to rely on extensive systems of mobilities of other people and objects to ensure that their study progresses without their own educational mobility. In doing so we move away from considering immobility as a result of limited access to mobility. Instead, we set out a new research agenda on why and how the infrastructures of immobilities are important in mobility research.
This paper outlines some of the material assemblages that are formed in international distance education (DE) in Africa. It offers a first exploratory study of materialities in DE and how they ...potentially distribute and aggregate to form a network to provide education. Through the use of interviews, students lived experiences are explored to unpack the multiplicity of networks needed to overcome the de‐aggregated and distributed institution. The multiplicity of networks that form in DE brings challenges that question how spaces become connected and disconnected and how different materialities shape DE. The materialities in DE produce forces and effects, such as translocal and transmobilites that are more than just the human actor, but extrude materials, networks, and connectives that transform continuously. The interconnectivities of the university and home or institution and students are brought together through enabling technology, but infrastructure does not always have the ability for the facilitation of aggregation.
De-migranticization is becoming a core strategy for overcoming the fetishization of migrants in migration studies. However, this shift in perspectives raises questions about what categories to use ...instead. This paper contributes to these debates by considering the potential of studying immobility as a tool for de-migranticization. It looks at immobility through the lens of liminality: as a transitory phase, as a transformative stage and as one which enables epistemological subversion. In doing so, it goes beyond other border spanning terms to offer methodological insights into using immobility and liminality to de-migranticize. The paper suggests that these qualities of reading immobility through theories of liminality has implications for when, where and how to study migration. The empirical case draws on 165 semi-structured interviews with distance education students from Zimbabwe, Namibia and Nigeria studying at the University of South Africa (UNISA).
Scholars are increasingly starting to engage in analysing non-use of social media among higher education students, but to date there lacks a framework within which to do so. Toward this end, this ...article identifies four key themes associated with not using social media to develop a typology of social media non-use. The themes are: 1) exclusion which may be owing to access problems or the social environment on social media; 2) distrust owing to difficulties surrounding authenticity, security and online collaboration; 3) distraction as a result of overwhelming or irrelevant information or communication; and 4) online discrimination. However, rather than claiming to set up a universal typology of non-use that applies to all higher education settings, we are promoting a new agenda for thinking about non-use of social media which is attentive to specific educational contexts. Basing our argument on research on international distance education students at the University of South Africa, we argue that any analysis should take a reflective and evolving stance which considers the multi-dimensional, temporally modulating nature of non-use that is sensitive to both student agency and the significance of the specific educational and geographic context. Moreover, the attention to African international distance education students is an important relocation, as thus far, typologies of social media have predominately been based on empirical case studies from ‘Western’ centres and imperatives. Placing African students centre stage realigns typologies of social media, illustrating and legitimizing the many centres from which social media non-use may be analysed and understood.
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•In South Africa, national student fees have hit the headlines as part of decolonisation debates.•However, international students struggle to pay fees too.•International students are ...not always privileged.•Affording fees requires everyday agency from international students.•Decolonisation must take on a pan-African vision and recognise international students’ fee concerns.
The #FeesMustFall movement focused on the financial struggles of historically disadvantaged black students in South Africa. However, if decolonisation is to go beyond national boundaries and to incorporate pan-African visions fees must fall, not only in South Africa, but also for international students. Yet, international students and their financial situations are often overlooked in discussions over fees as they are seen as foreigners, or as privileged and seeking to reproduce advantage through international study. Although international fees cross-subsidise national students, international students are seen as an export category rather than at the level of the individual, so that the actual costs of study to the students is often ignored. This paper addresses that gap by examining how international distance education students studying at the University of South Africa (UNISA) navigate fees. We draw upon students’ narratives to highlight the proactive and reactive agency they deploy to afford and manage fee payments. These quieter registers of everyday agency around fees demonstrate the entanglement of national and international fees in higher education. In particular, we suggest that focusing on international student fees raises important questions about whether lowering fees for higher education students, one part of the decolonisation agenda, should be contained within national borders.
Much of the research on how social media is embedded into the educational practices of higher education students has a Western orientation. In concentrating on a case study of the varied ways in ...which African International Distance Education (IDE) students actively use social media to shape their learning experiences, we discuss an under-researched group. The paper draws on analysis of 1295 online questionnaires and 165 in-depth interviews with IDE students at UNISA, South Africa, one of the largest providers of IDE globally. WhatsApp emerges as 'the' key social media tool that opens up opportunities for IDE students to transfer, translate and transform their educational journey when studying 'at a distance'. Although WhatsApp does provide a 'space of opportunity' for some students, this is framed through socio-technical marginalisation, itself a reflection of demographic legacies of inequality. Exploring social media practices though the case of African IDE students places these students centre stage and adds to the awareness of the multiple centres from which international education is practiced.
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