ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the limitations of the academic community and the challenges of academic scholarship by exploring the potential of ‘academic encounters’ for the understanding of borders within academia in the context of globalisation and cosmopolitanism. It reflects on Chris Rumford’s work on borders and strangeness and applies it to the academic context. The chapter aims to challenge existing borders within the academic world. It looks at the tuition fees and funding policies within the UK and discusses what kind of impact these policies have on students and young academics. Chris Rumford argues that while Robertson’s definition of globalisation seems to suggest that the subjective experience of globalisation further drives interconnectivity, it also creates a sense of strangeness due to the tension between ‘a highly developed global awareness’ and ‘the global dis-connectivity’ as a result of individual experiences of less-than-complete global connectivity.
