The global university reimagined: a post-qualitative study of space and place in English higher education

Thesis

In recent years, the idea of the global university has become a powerful yet under-theorised ideal in higher education. Universities are urged to pursue global engagement -across student and faculty bodies, research, teaching, and partnerships - yet what it means to be global is rarely questioned. In a market-driven environment, “global” status is largely assigned to research-intensive institutions via league tables, narrowing its meaning and obscuring its complexity. This study challenges such assumptions by rethinking how universities become global, rather than accepting globality as an institutional status.

It argues that globality is made and remade through the everyday rhythms, negotiations, and frictions of academic life. The research aims to recover the agency of universities - and the people and practices within them - in shaping their global condition.

Grounded in the premise that both globalisation and space are relationally produced through ongoing interactions among people, practices, technologies, and places, this study contends that the global is not imposed from outside but generated within and through the local - via the specific ways universities engage wider flows of knowledge, people, and ideas. This situates the global within the everyday spaces and practices of English universities.

Drawing on Doreen Massey’s theory of relational space and grounded in post-qualitative and new materialist approaches that treat inquiry as emergent and understand knowledge as produced in practice rather than discovered, the thesis undertakes a multi-sited inquiry across three contrasting English universities.

It uses diffractive analysis, an approach that reads interview materials through theory to trace how differences are produced and with what effects—rather than reducing accounts to themes. Guided by Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action and a concepts-as-method orientation, the study examines how “global university” identities are materially and discursively enacted in specific institutional contexts through online interviews with individuals occupying diverse roles.

In this way, the thesis re-theorises the global university as an emergent, situated process. It contributes methodological innovation by operationalising relational spatial theory through post-qualitative inquiry and offers new insights into how global imaginaries are produced and lived in local university spaces - inviting more reflexive, relational approaches to global engagement in higher education.

Authors: Antonio, D

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-yeyd2ne7j
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: global imaginary; space and place; Global University; post-qualitative; higher education; globalisation
• Subjects: Education