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Eduscapes: knowledge capital and cultures

Accelerating global flows of people and information have formed new communities and networks across social and political borders. Higher education is one such globalized knowledge community in which new patterns of knowledge, accreditation, research alliances, and social relationships are emerging. Education has become a lucrative global trade. New communications and information technologies have enabled new forms of community and knowledge exchange. Old boundaries and sovereignties, whether of nation, class or paradigm communities are eroding as new formations take shape. In this paper I outline the push-pull dynamics of globalization in higher education: the coconstitutive nature of local and global interests and educational formations, disjunctive flows of capital, information, people, and knowledge on the global eduscape, and the new politics of knowledge capital as they affect academic research and the public archive of scholarly publishing and university libraries. I close with reflections on the differential consequences of globalization on: the role of the nation state in higher education provision and reform, the role of education in nation building and national identity politics, and the governability of a global eduscape. This article was written between two countries, and will be published in a third. It is, like so much of our academic work these days, a kind of transnational educational artefact, tossed into the ebbs and flows of information and data, text and discourse that are at once both everywhere in a pedagogic, digital infoscape, and nowhere. It is both contextual in the broadest global sense, and localized, coming to ground with readers, publishers and editors in a specific context of interpretation. It and its frames of reference will be a matter of recognition for some readers, baffling for others, and a making of the familiar strange for yet others. In the Singapore where I am writing, the results of the US election, Arafat’s demise in Paris, and Thai ethnic-religious violence have very quickly been moved off the front pages and replaced, curiously, by the news that Singapore has placed both of its major universities in the upper ranks of the Times Higher Education Supplement league tables. These reports are interspersed with news on privatization of secondary schools, of changing project work requirements for senior students, buried in the midst ads for private tutoring, Australian, Studies in Language & Capitalism 1, 2006: 97 – 120. 98 American and British distance education degrees, MBAs of all sorts and language schools. In its unique historical and geographic position as city-state, as ‘middle kingdom’, as regional entrepot shipping point for goods, services, capital and information, Singapore has worked hard to market and redefine itself as the new South East Asian ‘educational hub’. The initial policy spin of ‘Cambridge of the East’ has now been passed by, almost forgotten in the rapid proliferation of educational providers, east and west, north and south. This has had effects on domestic economy, identity, national formation and social organization – with 93% plus of Singaporeans completing secondary school equivalents, university-participation levels pushing into the 30% range, and for the first time, not only Asians, but Europeans, Australians and North Americans coming to study here. It is in education-obsessed culture, with ‘no studying allowed’ signs posted at airport fast food outlets to keep students away, with ads on trains and busses advertising distance education degrees, and with overseas universities chasing students through shopping mall storefront operations. As all things in the tropics, things grow, wither, decay at a rapid rate. To any and all observers, this is not just a particular postmodern, high-tech, consumerist version of Asia, of the city, of the city-state – it is the eduscape on steroids. The new global educscape is the topic of this paper.