Internationalization has rapidly become an institutional priority for colleges and universities around the world. Our research team is examining how internationalization and why internationalization has become viewed as an imperative and legitimizing discourse in global higher education, how institutions can better serve their international students, and what internationalization will look like in the COVID-affected era.
Recent and Current Projects
This project critically examines approached to internationalization as articulated in official institutional internationalization strategies. A team of 10 volunteer research assistants has contributed to a collection of over 75 strategies from English-speaking countries, including 33 from Canada, as well as an additional 25 from other countries. A coding protocol was developed, and all research assistants received rigorous training on the protocol, which includes 33 primary codes in five main categories: activities and priorities; rationales, discourses, and justifications; explicit values; geography; and organizational implementation. The analysis revealed that most documents focus narrowly on strategic benefits, namely revenue generation through international student recruitment and reputational prestige through research partnerships. These practices are justified through abstract commitments to global citizenship, diversity, and societal progress.
This work was funded by an institutional grant (SSHRC – Institutional Grant 2018)
This project examines how internationalization processes are related to racialization among Asian (i.e., Chinese, Indian and Korean) international students as part of a pan-Canadian study investigating how Asian international students are racialized on Canadian university campuses.
This work is funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant (PI: Jean-Michel Montison, York University)
The Future of Internationalization Partnership Project is a 3-year partnership that brings together the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto, the International Association of Universities (IAU) and the Center for International Higher Education (CIHE) at Boston College to chart the future of internationalization post-pandemic.
This multi-year, mixed-methods research project funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada will identify innovative practices in response to the ongoing crisis and expand a network of international scholars and practitioners dedicated to exploring future possibilities for sustainable, ethical and equitable internationalization.
Elizabeth Buckner, Adriana Marroquin Rodriquez, You Zhang and Jessica Denenberg are supporting the project at OISE. Giorgio Marionini is leading the project at the IAU, and Maia Gelashvili, Lizhou Wang, Gerardo Blanco, Rebecca Schendel and Hans de Wit are among the CIHE staff supporting this project.
As part of this project, we conducted a rigorous review of the literature on COVID-19’s impact on internationalization. Our analysis examined the short-term impact of COVID-19 on internationalization, spanning March 2020-August 2021. In total, we identified 158 publications, including peer-reviewed academic articles, magazines, newspapers and book chapters that met our inclusion criteria. We then coded each publication based on its publication type, country or region of focus, internationalization domain or activity, and emergent key themes.
You can access the studies collected as part of the rigorous review below.