Roundtable on Academic Mobility of Scholars from the Global South in Higher Education

Utrecht University hosts a roundtable on Academic Mobility of Scholars from the Global South in Higher Education on 10 July. During the roundtable, speakers will share their experiences with North-South mobility, and discuss the hurdles they encounter. The conversation will touch upon various topics, including institutional policies, deeply rooted power dynamics, and the psychological and temporal burdens of academic mobility.

Utrecht University understands that the scale and complexity of societal questions require efforts beyond the borders of one university, one organisation or one country. For this reason, our university seeks to collaborate and build international partnerships to share ideas, perspectives and resources. However, particularly when engaging with scholars from the Global South, institutions struggle to address the theoretical tensions that these collaborations entail and the practical (professional and personal) challenges they face.

Join us on the 10^th of July at 16:30 for a Roundtable on Academic Mobility of Scholars from the Global South in Higher Education, co-sponsored by the IOS In-Equality Platform, the Gender, Diversity and Global Justice Platform and the RE-WIRING Project. During the roundtable, speakers will share their experiences with North-South mobility, and discuss the hurdles they encounter. The conversation will touch upon various topics, including institutional policies, deeply rooted power dynamics, and the psychological and temporal burdens of academic mobility.

Speakers:

Dr. Thelma Arko is a leading expert in environmental research and policy, with a PhD in Environmental Science from the University of Ghana/UNU-INRA. Her research focuses on just energy transitions with a focus on global climate policy, specifically the carbon market. 

Dr. Devran Gülel is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. She has an interdisciplinary background across human rights law, politics, society, and organisational studies. Originally from Turkey, Dr. Gülel has experienced different higher education systems and cultures. Drawing from those experiences, she reflects on geopolitical hierarchies, institutional (mis)trust, and mobility restrictions through a critical feminist lens, as well as how these experiences often shape the careers of Global South scholars.

Dr. Ajohche Awungjia is a Cameroonian researcher based at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. Her interests are in sociolinguistics, media and discourse analysis, gender studies, and multilingual pedagogy. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow on the RE-WIRING EU project HQ'd at the University of Utrecht, focusing on media representations of gender and the empowerment of women and girls in South Africa and Europe.

Dr Julie Fraser is an Australian lawyer and academic at the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights UU. Her research focuses on international human rights law, and particularly its nexus with the climate crisis. Julie has undertaken research on these topics in Indonesia and Kenya.