Shifting Tides: The Potential and Limitations of Critical Mass to Change Discipline Research Habits

As we consider the future of Pacific scholarship in Aotearoa–New Zealand it becomes vital to consider what we wish that future to look like and how to get there. Part of that talanoa involves considering what the possible levers of change are and whether they are capable of fulfilling our desires for change. This article outlines the different national interventions that are being made to increase Pacific engagement in Aotearoa–New Zealand’s universities, and then considers whether these interventions are fulfilling our vision for our communities. In order to deepen conversations in this space, this article also draws on critical university studies literature to help unpack the current situation and to provoke some questioning around our current trajectory.

Review of The University and Social Justice: Struggles across the Globe edited by Aziz Choudry and Salim Vally (Pluto Press / Between the Lines)

In this edited collection, Aziz Choudry and Salim Vally present reflections and analyses from scholar-activists in education studies, anthropology, literature, and cultural studies describing university-based and affiliated social movements. Through thirteen essays covering case studies in twelve countries, the anthology offers a broad review of student organizing against neoliberalization and more specifically, the privatization of higher education; intersectional and coalitional strategies imagined through these struggles; and alternative modes of knowledge production pre-figured in their organizing. Geographic and disciplinary breadth make the anthology a welcome addition to the growing corpus of (transnational) critical university studies.

5. Toward an Ethics of Opacity in Higher Education Internationalization

<?page nr="91"?>Abstract This conceptual essay employs the intersecting lenses of critical university studies (CUS) and decolonial theory to make a critical intervention into the terrain of ethics in higher education internationalization. It is argued that a combined framework of ideas from CUS and decolonial theory will bring a sharper social justice and decolonizing edge to debates on how to disrupt dominant ethical frames of action in higher education internationalization. In particular, the author develops Corey Walker’s (2011) notion of the “ethics of opacity” as an approach that interrogates the logics of neoliberalism and coloniality/modernity in internationalization practices and policies of higher education. It is suggested that the ethics of opacity provides ethical and political recognition to the opaque sites and repressed knowledges of marginalized and colonized peoples. The paper discusses the implications of the ethics of opacity for a renewed agenda in internationalization practices and policies of higher education.