Globalisation has become the central issue of our time and defined the world we inherited. Such processes have been taking place for a long time, but have been accelerated and intensified in the past few decades by the increasing digitalisation; the accelerating cross-border financial flows and human traffic, the integrating trading and economic activity, and increasing use of common currencies and languages across different nations. The impact that these changes are having on universities is profound and, within universities, the key strategic responses to globalisation have come to be known as internationalisation. Therefore, it can be understood that the concepts of globalisation and internationalisation have attained household status in many fields of human endeavour, especially in higher education (Maringe & Foskett, 2010). Or in other words, the reciprocity that exists between these two concepts. For example, the intensification of student mobility that may result from an institutional strategy to increase overseas student recruitment contributes to the further intensification of globalisation. Similarly, intensifying curriculum internationalisation processes will result in making the university educational product more attractive and therefore help to increase student mobility in recruitment markets. As a result, over the past 10 or 12 years, the term internationalisation has gone from nowhere to be everywhere across UK universities, which hastened the publication of The Internationalisation of Higher Education Whitepaper in 2016.

However, there are reportedly disadvantages and low attainments among international students. This is worsening in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and the intense UK-China relations. Chinese international students in particular have encountered ever increasing racial profiling in UK universities. There is limited research on how neoliberal discourse in education has impacted on the identities of  international students and how attainments of international students are affected by internationalisation, marketisation, and racialisation (neo-racism or cultural discrimination) in UK HE (Smith, 2020). Research on UK BAME domiciled students identified ethnic inequalities in UK elite university admissions, widening student attainment gaps, and racial privilege (see Alexander & Arday, 2015; Sian, 2019). This focus however does not capture the experiences of racialised international students. Studies of international students focus on their intercultural challenges but overlook the wider political issues associated with marketisation and racialisation. Culture shocks and alienation are revealed in experiences of Chinese international students (Gu, 2009). To cope, some adopt various learning modes (Wu, 2015). Many ‘cuddle for warmth’ with each other and foster ‘Chinese schools’ within UK HE (Yu & Moskal, 2019). This is driven by both growing Chinese nationalism and the ‘re-learning’ of cultural roots in foreign and alienating context (Gu & Schwersfurth, 2015). The literature on diversity and inclusion strategies in UK HE argues that the pursuit of economic efficiency creates institutional constraints on teachers to develop inclusive pedagogies (Hockings, 2010). This in turn often reinforces the culture shocks and alienation experienced by International students.

It is within the above context, the proposed project aims to make a wholistic study of the curriculum design and the pedagogy implemented, examining both attainments and changing identities of university (Chinese) international students in the processes of market driven learning experience within the context of HE reforms across the UK and China, the increasingly tense UK-China relations, and the Covid-19 pandemic. The project employs questionnaire surveys, interviews, and focus groups for its inquiry with attempt to support UK-HE policymakers in their efforts to provide an equal and inclusive HE and inform culturally responsive multilingual classrooms.

Blog by Yangguang Chen 

Conference paper for IBBY Congress, 2022: Dr Julia Hope and Rosemary Rich

As an “insider” research team, being the descendants of a conscientious objector in World War II, this paper brings together our respective fields of historical memory studies and literary theory to consider children’s literature about pacifism and war resistance.  Over the ages, a multitude of children’s books about war have offered many different angles on the adventure, hardships, and suffering involved.  Such stories have become increasingly popular since the turn of the century, offering a progressively more realistic treatment, with wars in living memory providing the largest corpus, although recent conflicts around the world are also coming into focus.  However, little has been written that confronts themes of pacifism and war resistance for children, especially concerning conscientious objection.

With a particular focus on World War I and II, we explore through critical content analysis (Johnson et al., 2017) how this contentious area is dealt with in four recently published middle grade/young adult texts recently published in the UK. Two books chosen focus on World War I: “Remembrance” by Theresa Breslin (2002) and “Across the Divide” by Anne Booth (2018); and two on World War II: “Run Rabbit Run” by Barbara Mitchelhill (2015) and “In the Mouth of the Wolf” by Michael Morpurgo (2018).

Using this framework we ask the following questions: Whose story is told? From whose point of view? How is pacifism and war resistance presented and explained to children and young people?  How do wartime attitudes compare with those of the present day?  How is the story resolved and what might this suggest about author standpoint?

These controversial issues would seem to be a necessary part of the wide-ranging tapestry of children’s literature that demonstrates the power of stories, within the theme of empathy and memory in storytelling, with a particular focus on moral values, peace and human rights.

Blog by Julia Hope

Dr Julia Hope has just completed a chapter for the Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives entitled: “Applying RefugeeCrit to Recent Middle Grade/Young Adult Children’s Literature About Refugees” and to be published imminently.

This chapter considers that since the millennium there have been a plethora of texts about the refugee experience for children and young people across the Western world.  Although not a homogeneous category, literature of this kind can follow an almost formulaic representation of the refugee experience, with a recent trend towards increasingly grim and explicit depictions of the suffering of refugee children, especially when trapped in refugee camps.

There is an emergent field of academic study that questioning the motivations of authors, the messages of such stories, and the images of refugees proffered by the books.  I examine in depth two middle grade/young adult texts, “The Bone Sparrow” by Zara Fraillion (2016) and “Boy, Everywhere” by A. M. Dassu (2020), both of which have received considerable public acclaim.  However, RefugeeCrit suggests that narratives can depict refugee children as victims of politically sanitised global disasters, without background explanation of the causes, and in need of “white saviours” with “helping hands” to bring them to safety.  Nevertheless, this framework is helpful in critiquing these texts, but can prove challenging when authoring this literature, and when recommending quality refugee narratives for middle grade/young adult readers.

Blog by Julia Hope