The Potential of African Diaspora Academics and Diaspora Academics in Africa in Reshaping International Higher Education

The potential of collaborative online international learning as a border thinking third space for global citizenship education

“…Border thinking is thinking from the outside, not being positioned in modernity and the yardstick thereof, using alternative knowledge traditions and alternative ways of expressing (Jacobs et al, 2022). Alternative perspectives from outside the norm introduce other ontologies and other epistemologies into the hegemonic discourse of Western modernity.…”

“…Aligning with Le Grange (2016), we suggest that COIL requires critical engagement in the learning exchange with entangled constructions with respect to difference valued for its intrinsic worth. Furthermore, and from a border thinking perspective (repositioning alternative knowledge traditions), we examine how COIL finds ways for learners to dwell in borderlands and enter new terrain, physical and otherwise, multiple and overlapping, to enable a critical questioning and reflection of ways of relating to the world, of feeling, acting, living and inhabiting the world that emanate from perspectives decentring Western hegemonies (Jacobs et al, 2022;Wolhuter and Jacobs, 2021). Border thinking is deliberately different from the thinking that feeds into the 'colonial matrix of power'; it is thinking and expressing that is defiant, informed by 'subaltern ways of doing, knowing and being', and it disrupts the colonial and territorial 'desire for hegemony and homogeny' (Jacobs et al, 2022: 33).…”