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ABSTRACT
In this paper we introduce our special issue, "Internationalization for an Uncertain Future: Emerging Conversations in Critical Internationalization Studies." In addition to reviewing the individual contributions to this issue, we also consider emerging areas of inquiry in the field of critical internationalization studies (CIS), and invite consideration of how the field might responsibly confront the challenges, complexities, and possibilities that emerge in efforts to imagine and practice internationalization otherwise in today's complex, uncertain, and unequal world.
Keywords: critique, complexity, complicity, internationalization otherwise
Internationalization has been deemed central for addressing the challenges of an increasingly complex, uncertain, and unequal world. Through institutional strategies, policies, pedagogies, and practices, internationalization has been mobilized as a means to prepare students, produce useful knowledge, and generate solutions for the proliferating challenges our interconnected planet. Further, it has largely been framed as a neutral and inevitable process, coalescing around an "internationalization imperative" (Buckner & Stein, 2020) that emphasizes practical questions about how institutions should internationalize, rather than ethical and political questions about why, in whose name, for whose benefit, and to what end they should internationalize. Yet a growing number of critical voices have expressed concern that mainstream approaches to internationalization not only reflect but also potentially naturalize and reproduce already uneven geo-political, economic, and epistemic relations.
Emerging out of the Critical Internationalization Studies Network and lively conversations at a conference sponsored by the Spencer Foundation in June 2020, this special issue of The Journal of International Students examines recent developments and identifies the limits and edges of existing debates in the field of critical internationalization studies (CIS). Together, the articles elucidate CIS's internally diverse research agenda, identify future priority areas, and propose possible pathways for internationalization to be reimagined in the service of addressing shared global challenges in more equitable, sustainable, and ethical ways. In this introduction to the special issue, before we briefly review the insights offered by each contribution, we offer our own reading of contemporary conversations in CIS, and identify some of the emerging questions at the edges of the field.
SETTING THE SCENE: DIVERGENT APPROACHES TO CRITIQUE
Scholars and practitioners in critical internationalization studies draw attention to the risks of reproducing uneven global power relations, colonial representations, and extractive resource flows in mainstream approaches...