To investigate how the process of peripheralisation usurps internationalisation experiences within the global higher education centres, this article draws on two separate case studies, one conducted in Finland and the other in the UK. In both contexts, Anglophone hegemony plays an important role, but in different manners. In the Finnish case, conflating internationalisation with Englishisation results in both domestic and international students and staff having to continuously grapple with language use in their daily lives. In the UK context, international students in English-speaking universities encounter asymmetric power relations with the locals, which they try to overcome through identity negotiation over digital and physical spaces. Both cases show that creating a liveable international university necessitates structural changes that would build on already existing agentic engagements of international students and staff.

This article investigates contemporary attempts to reform the institution of the university according to neoliberal ideological influences and oppositions to them. It employs Doreen Massey’s concept of space to focus on relations and separations made in the process. My ethnography of the University of Helsinki’s 375th anniversary celebration, which turned into a public spectacle of various visions of higher education, constitutes the main empirical material. Finland’s ambivalent position in the world renders the spatial work of forging connections and disconnections particularly conspicuous. It enables specific neoliberal aspirations (such as to be among ‘the world’s best universities’ amidst global competition) to become very strong but also allows additional trajectories, like the one about higher education as public goods, to present themselves as legitimate alternatives. The centre-periphery relations are therefore critical sites for analysing the contemporary university transformation, since they appear to be key drivers of the reform but also the primary source of resistance to it.

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Lockdowns and social distancing measures in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic have made remote participation a necessity for a wide range of social situations. This article examines one example: the abrupt transformation of the Finnish doctoral defence into a remote-access experience facilitated by video-conferencing technologies. The event is regularly centred on a formal public academic debate, rife with local academic ritual and ceremonial formality and firmly tied to the assumption of physical co-presence in the material space. Following the tradition of spatial conceptualisations of the digital, we draw inspiration from Henri Lefebvre’s theory on the production of space, particularly the analytical framework of the spatial triad, which enables regarding the doctoral defence as a social space made up of relations between things. As remote-access tools are introduced, new actants enter the field; the relations they mediate are affected, as is the social space that the relations constitute. This facilitates the examination of the effects that remote-access technologies have on conceiving, perceiving and living the doctoral defence, and ultimately on the social space as holistically understood. Our analysis is based on observations of remote-access defences and interviews with doctoral candidates who defended their doctoral theses remotely. Our findings highlight how the social space of the defence is both curtailed and broadened by remote-access technologies; some relations that make up space are narrowed while others stretch sufficiently to be included. As a result, the remote-access defence conceptually counts as the real thing in our material, but it remains unsatisfactory as an experience. This finding suggests how to mediate social space without reducing it: focusing on the lived experience and ensuring that it is not inadvertently distorted.