Universities as transformative social spaces : mobilities and mobilizations from South Asian perspectives / edited by Andrea Kolbel, Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, Susan Thieme

"Going to university can be a period of great freedom, widening horizons and social openings but can also consist of heteronomy, disciplining and conflicts. Comprising a growing degree of heterogeneity in physically delineated premises, universities are social spaces where diverse personal trajectories connect, confront each other, and/or run parallel to each other. Against the backdrop of students' (self-)reflexivity, democratic education, political tensions, international competition and exclusionary forces, this book captures dynamic transformations in the realm of higher education from South Asian perspectives. It is the first attempt to map out spatial, social and political dimensions of student mobilities and mobilizations to understand how these dimensions intertwine and instigate social re-configurations. It comprises empirically rich and analytically innovative inquiries by sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, and educational and political science scholars. Read together, these inquiries provide an understanding of universities as localized social spaces while embedding them in global and transnational processes"--