Reimagining internationalisation in higher education: a North-South partnership in social work education between Norway, India and South Africa

Project summary

Over the recent decades, internationalisation has emerged as a central feature of higher education, frequently framed as a means of fostering global engagement, knowledge production, and social relevance. Dominant models of internationalisation have, however, been criticised for reproducing colonial logics, epistemic injustices, and asymmetrical power relations, particularly within North–South partnerships. Located within this critical terrain, this article analyses a collaborative project in social work between higher education institutions in Norway, South Africa, and India entitled Social Work Education for a Global World/ SoWeGlow. Drawing on a qualitative, collaborative autoethnographic methodology, the article analyses narrative reflections and collective dialogues among project partners to explore how diverse aspects of international engagement are understood and described. Conceptually, the analysis is informed by critical internationalisation studies and decolonial perspectives, which have enabled a productive reflection on the principles underpinning the collaboration; the problems encountered in negotiating power, knowledge, and institutional constraints; and the forms of progress and possibility that emerge within these conditions. The findings suggest that the SWG project is best understood, based on the narrative reflections of the authors, as an assemblage of multiple articulations of internationalisation, engaging primarily at the methodological and epistemological levels. While national and institutional frameworks limit more radical transformation, the project nonetheless has enabled the creation of an important generative space for the critical interrogation of Eurocentric knowledge regimes, re-centering knowledge produced by social work practitioners and epistemologies from the global south within social work, and fostering more dialogical, reflexive and socially just forms of global educational collaboration. The article argues that such partnerships, though partial and situated, can function as critical sites for thinking about and eventually enacting modes of internationalisation that promote relationality and epistemic justice, and in doing so, respond constructively to the unequal and uneven terrain of north-south engagement in higher education.