Global higher education and variegated regionalisms

This chapter examines the rise of supra-national regions and the role that higher education is increasingly playing in constituting regions on the one hand, and reconstituting higher education on the other, in different parts of the world. It argues that, oddly enough, although a great deal is written on regions such as the European Higher Education Area, there has been little exploration of what insights this work generates for understanding regions, and the nature of the relationship between European higher education projects and those in other parts of the world. In the chapter a case is made for a particular theoretical approach and methodological lens – that of ‘variegated regionalism’ _ to study regions empirically, rather than being trapped in a Europe-dominated paradigm which measures all other regional developments against this assumed one way. Using studies on higher education regionalisms in different geographic locations of the globe, the author shows that very different cultural political and economic trajectories matter, and determine different regional formations in higher education.