ABSTRACT
This chapter problematises normative discourses attempting to morally guide internationalisation policy in higher education. It argues that they are based on Gestaltic assumptions, of the whole as greater than the sum of its parts, and are prone to adapting to persistent logics of capital accumulation while promising and projecting a sustainable taming of its territorial and embodied injuries. By defining internationalisation as a regime of truth, the chapter claims that other world relationalities are rendered impossible, for example, the materialities, knowledge, learning, and internationalisation subjectivities that stand outside the capitalocentric and heteronormative framework. By drawing on a queer politics of knowledge aimed at the construction of new and multiple regimes of visibility, experiences of migrant and mobile academics from different territories and in different geographies of knowledge – Chile, Japan, and South Africa are examined. The chapter analyses the intersections of heteronormativity and racism, on the one hand, and on the translocational meaning of the figure of the migrant, on the other hand, as a way to queer the hegemonic and moralising conceptions of internationalisation. The chapter proposes the notion of embodied internationalisation to uncover the patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist logics of internationalisation that are revealed in quotidian micropolitical experiences and subjectification frequently disqualified from dominant narratives.
