Mobile Educational Spaces and Imaginative Student Experiences: The Case of Transnational Higher Education (Research into Higher Education)

Bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives from sociology, education, and human geography to investigate the space, community, and culture at an International Branch Campus, this fascinating book provides empirical evidence to understand the implications for students’ future socio-spatial mobilities.

Drawing on ethnographic data from a British International Branch Campus in China this book offers a timely discussion about transnational higher education. It illustrates the mobility of the educational space, where mobilities and materiality converge and are mediated by transnational imaginations. Students are portrayed as ‘imaginative travellers’, who may not have been physically abroad but are imaginatively mobilised by transnational material, social and cultural flows on campus. This book demonstrates how imaginative mobility cultivates students’ cosmopolitan orientations and competence, while acknowledging how structural constraints weave unevenness into the imaginative flows that arise and respond to the socio-spatial inequalities in global education landscapes. This study also offers empirical insights into China’s approach to transnational education that informs both research and policy.

This book is valuable reading for scholars, students, researchers and practitioners in higher education, particularly for those with an interest in educational studies, sociology, and human geography.

Jingran Yu is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Education, Xiamen University, China and an Honorary Research Associate at the School of Environment, Education and Development, University of Manchester, UK.