Colonising the future: Mega-trade deals, education services and global higher education markets

Abstract

This paper explores a less well-examined aspect of time in relation to higher education and the academy; that of 'time-future'. The paper takes the case of education trade strategies being pursued by governments and allied agencies, and explores the multiple ways in which time-future is mobilised. Drawing on trade documents, government statistics, and related reports, the paper points to two time-future dynamics at work. The first dynamic focuses on the ways in which the future is imagined by strategic actors, and legitimating through creating equivalences between education trade, economic growth and prosperity. The second dynamic explores the ways in which the current round of global and regional trade negotiations colonise the future as a political resource. I reflect on how time-future is a key resource and modality of power to be claimed and cognitively shaped so as to reorient actor's expectations towards the rhythms and demands of capitalism, and away from the temporal orders of the academy. However, efforts to commodify higher education, on the one hand, and colonise higher education futures exclusively to serve the interests of economic investors, on the other, continue to be contested. As a result, a new temporal order is yet to become common-sense, and an existing order is yet to die.

Digital scholarship, higher education and the future of the public intellectual

“…The rise of the digitised public intellectual will march on, regardless of what the university does or does not do (Lange, 2015). It is also the case that the university itself as an institutional force is currently undergoing considerable change and is being reimagined in various ways (Barnett, 2013(Barnett, , 2016Robertson, 2017). Nevertheless, existing in tandem with these developments is a still strong desire on the part of both publics and the academy to engage with ideas in the public arena (Burawoy, 2005;Lilla, 2001;Mclaughlin, 2005; McLaughlin and Toney, 2011).…”

Unthinking knowledge production: from post-Covid to post-carbon futures

“…Global flows of capital and global networks of knowledge production, in this sense, reflect and reproduce colonial relationships between 'centres' and 'peripheries', but they also create new ones. In the recent few years, China's Belt and Road initiative has intensified the competition between European, North American, Australian and New Zealand institutions, for whom Chinese students constitute a significant portion of income (Robertson, 2017). In this sense, the Covid-19 crisis only rendered visibleor more visiblethe degree to which contemporary networks of knowledge production were deeply rooted in the global economic and political order.…”

Making education markets through global trade agreements

“…As a result, "in economic practice, fictional expectations take a narrative form, and become articulated as stories that tell how the future will look and how the economy will unfold into the future from the current state of affairs" (Beckert, 2016: 10). These stories are embedded in frames, which include an ensemble of economic theories, such as development, risk and calculation, or technological progress, and are mediated through the deployment of a range of strategies and devices, such as formatting tools, statistical trends, impact assessments, detailed and complicated clauses and annexes in trade agreements, and a range of means of mediating or managing out potential other stories or narratives about the way the world could work (see Robertson, 2017).…”

“…Trade agreements are rich with various devices which work on this cognitive reorientation to the future. Stand-still, ratchet and progressive liberalization clauses are all aimed at this recalibration (Robertson, 2017). However in the current trade deals (TISA, TPP, CETA and TIPP) the future has also been colonized by the investors via mechanism and devices which discourage governments from putting the brakes on, or reversing decisions around the making of global markets.…”