Abstract
Transformations Beyond Geographies: South Asian University
Universities in contemporary times are epicentres of transformation by being the hub of different struggles, mobilisations and mobility. This has opened up debates on heteronomy, disparities, hierarchy, inclusion, exclusion, conflict, resistances and voicing concerns. This book makes the reader realise that universities; though a bounded space, seamlessly work as a server, connecting the global, national and local simultaneously. The dominant narratives in the book can be bunched into two categories: mobilities and mobilisations in South Asian nations like India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan. As far as mobility is concerned, this book captures some of the under-researched areas, like migration within the inter-Asian region. Literature is replete with narratives of migration to the hegemonic West, but this volume attempts to explore the South Asian universities as the locus of new mobilities in terms of accommodating students from diverse back- grounds, transnational, national and regional. It encapsulates different dimensions of mobilities, including the one on the international front that allows internationalisation of higher education, triggering social, cultural and human capital to be on the flow and triggering transformations on various grounds. With the massive circulation of people, objects and information, this book talks about the politics of mobility and the centres of power constellation, creating a new global hierarchy in academics that calls for a novel paradigm for studies on mobilities for the student population in the South Asian region. Besides, this book grasps middle-class mobilities, which are normally paid very little attention in migration studies.
This book carves out a broader framework to look at universities as social spaces not just restricted to classrooms, libraries or the material infrastructure in terms of hostel rooms and other centres for education or recreation, but whose boundaries transgress the institutional set-up. The deeper penetration of universities into political bodies through student union bodies work as breeding grounds for new recruits in politics or their connectivity with youth organisations that provides them with enough social and cultural capital for taking a place in the modern neoliberal market and to the global economy in general, and to civil society through student mobilisations as well. Varsities’ relations with education ministries, policymakers and funding agencies make their connections stronger with the state. At the same time, universities act as critiques not only to the state but also to the existing knowledge system and norms, yet they evolve as spaces for scrutiny, contestations and innovations. The struggles, politics and mobilisations within the campus go beyond the immediate campus concerns and are related to some distant ideology and global/national/regional/ local issues. The immediate issues within the campus are interpreted through the broader theoretical lens that makes universities a microcosm of a given society or societies. Universities often become sites of existing discriminatory practices in terms of caste, ethnicity and gender, with dominant communities chiselling out their own spatial modalities to other communities, and at the same time, they end up creating newer forms of discrimination, for instance, in the category of foreign students.
This book stands out for a variety of reasons. First, it looks at universities from a cross-disciplinary line, taking into consideration international as well as national perspectives. Second, it surfaces the lesser-visible areas of power asymmetry existing between ex-colonial nations and the West, constructing a South Asian lens for understanding different dimensions of university as a social space. Most of the chapters have deployed empirical research using trans-local and transnational methodologies. It claims to have overcome the limitations of ‘methodological nationalism’ as it goes beyond the national boundaries as its field of study, which I believe is a narrow understanding of infringing ‘methodological nationalism’. This work could have been strengthened had it aligned its methodological moorings with a robust theoretical framework. I would say that the concept of ‘social space’ has been loosely used in this volume. Just to cite an example, I suggest that the author/editor could have developed on Bourdieu’s (Danahay, 2019) or Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) conception of ‘social space’ in tandem with its methodological groundings. The claim about transgressing ‘methodological nationalism’ would have been justified in the real sense then. Further, the idea of trans-local and transnational methodology and the interconnections between the global, national, regional and local could have been established both theoretically and methodologically by dealing with the different dimensions of spaces in university set-ups. Thus, the title of the volume, Universities as Transformative Social Spaces, does not get properly established through this work. Though the categories of caste, class and geographical groupings in terms of West, East and South Asia have received adequate attention in the volume, the issue of gender is still an underexplored area as far as student migration within the university setting is concerned. Conceptualising and contextualising the notion of intersectionality among the above-mentioned categories would have shed new light in a South Asian context. Besides, the idea of ‘social’ in ‘social space’ needs to be defined and explored to establish the transformative roles taken up by varsities.