Keynote

Keynote on The changing dynamics of space and scale: The university between nationalism and globalism with Simon Marginson, Professor at the University of Oxford.

Professor Jo Dillabough (University of Cambridge) will act as discussant.

For 2025, the Policy Futures International Webinar Series will serve as a prelude to the release of the World Yearbook of Education 2026: The Changing Geopolitics of Higher Education and Research University futures reimagined . Edited by: Katja Brøgger, Hannah Moscovitz, Susan Robertson, and Jenny Lee. The 2025 keynotes have contributed to this volume which is scheduled for publication in late 2025/early 2026.

Abstract
After remarks on spatiality and the intersection of the national and global scales of action, Simon Marginson tracks the changing geopolitical order in higher education in two main historical phases: (1) Western-dominated and primarily U.S.-led globalization from 1990 to 2015, and (2) after 2015 a major reversal of liberal internationalism in the West, the partial deglobalization amid more conflictual geopolitics. The uneven but widespread Western pushback against cross-border connections has been triggered by the erosion of the longstanding colonial order and the growing global multiplicity in agency, culture, and identity, including the rise of China and much of the global South; and the neoliberal immiseration of Euro-American populations which has fuelled populist politics. Soft power objectives have receded and hard power has become more important. Normative internationalization and cosmopolitanism have given way to singular national identities,  the weakening of multilateralism, nativist resistance to migration including cross-border student mobility, the U.S.-engineered partial breakdown in U.S.-China relations in political economy, technology, science, and universities, and the part subordination of research policies and scientific collaboration to national security. However, the trend to deglobalization and decoupling is not shared outside the Western world where cross-border connections in higher education continue to be maintained and developed.