This interview is with Kalyani Unkule, Associate Professor at O.P. Jindal Global University in India. Kalyani’s research complements her practice in intercultural dialogue and impact-driven projects in higher education internationalisation and spiritual learning. She is also one of the co-editors of the upcoming Research with International Students book.
Her work can be reviewed here.
Interviewer: Can you tell us a little about your journey to becoming a researcher? What is your background?
Kalyani: My educational background is eclectic spanning Economics, Social Work, Global Studies, Global History, and International Relations and International Law. An inherent inclination to think laterally was served well by this spectrum of lenses and helped me see value in the breadth of learning and experience. Working with practice-based disciplines like social work and gaining several years of work experience before pursuing a doctorate afforded me vital opportunities to unlearn textbook tenets and disciplinary strictures. In that sense I never really became a researcher but remained a scholar following her intuition to the next vantage, preferably marginal, I could usefully see things from anew. I feel very lucky to have left India to learn with other places and contexts after earning my first master’s here. To me, you can’t truly appreciate the world unless you are dynamically aware of where you come from. This belief, together with my curiosity about other ways of knowing, led me to decolonial approaches to knowledge creation, which is my current focus.
Interviewer: What interested you in specifically doing research about internationalisation or with international students?
Kalyani: When I was studying abroad, I started wondering why my friends from different parts of the world didn’t have as many opportunities to experience India. When I returned and started working, I launched a small start-up to support institutional collaborations and build networks. A short while later, I ended up heading International Affairs at a young university in India – a role I held for the better part of a decade. Doing work like that based in the Global South gives you great insight into how higher education internationalisation is a site of entrenched coloniality. We work on the assumption that there are unequal standards of learning in different parts of the world. Diversity, dialogue, and exchange get lip service but in the name of best practice we cement all kinds of hierarchical and exclusionary templates determining what is valid and exemplary, with the rest inevitably and endlessly playing catch up. As an internationalisation practitioner, I could no longer turn away from the troubling realisation of just how constitutive education is – and has long been – of an unequal world.
Complicity and self-reflection are essential components of decolonising knowledge creation. While critique and embedded narratives are important, we in the South cannot abdicate our responsibility to contribute towards de-centering concepts and frameworks and embracing liberatory methods. I feel strongly about adding a voice from the peripheries to ongoing debates about the future of international higher education.
Interviewer: What is your overall impression of this research subfield? Where do you see it going in the next 5-10 years?
Kalyani: I wish the research subfield would open itself up more to allied and complementary fields. Let me give two examples based on my own ongoing work. The first is to analyse international higher education and student mobility more explicitly as a subset of international relations. This opens the door to dealing with the politics of knowledge which is geared to maintaining macro-level power hierarchies. That is as far as level of analysis is concerned.
The second one is to do with pushing conceptual boundaries. Instead of remaining mired in current trends and dynamics, I would like to see work which draws on other types of mobility, i.e. those not strictly related to education, as well as ancient forms of mobility for knowledge seeking.
I find that these two approaches, coming from the outside in, spotlight and problematise certain operative assumptions in our subfield, while also allowing us to generate hypotheses and language that are interoperable with other fields.
Interviewer: Your research has often focused on a spiritual approach to international education. Can you give us a bit of insight into what this subfield can gain from thinking through this lens?
Kalyani: Knowledge nomads travelling to ancient India sought spiritual wisdom and actualisation. So historically, there is a link between international education and spiritual learning. Spiritual practices emerge from an effort to make sense of the world in all its baffling magnificence and contradiction, which is why, they contain great potential for operationalising “other ways of knowing”. The more we go out looking for voices which have been suppressed, the more we find that their ways of understanding the world have been discredited, allowed to fade away, and, as often, violently erased. Going down spiritual pathways in a broadly construed sense, has allowed me to draw out those voices.
As someone who is on the quest for alternatives to the dominant paradigm of knowledge creation, knowing that the truth is one but the paths leading to it are many is freeing. Deep knowing resided in our bodies and our intuitive faculties and I see no reason not to access it. This isn’t always an easy choice because we privilege the intellect and the academic realm, in addition, discourages many styles of expression. On the other hand, my experience has taught me time and time again that research that is spiritually nourishing to us scholars will undoubtedly serve someone or some purpose in the world.
In sum, what the subfield can gain from this lens is being led to marginalised perspectives, moving beyond critiquing dominant research methods to actually incorporating other ways of knowing, and permission for the individual scholar-seeker to follow their bliss.
Interviewer: What advice would you give to researchers who are developing a new research study with and about international students?
Kalyani: Other ways of knowing are intimately connected with other ways of being. Simply adding/foregrounding more international student voices is not enough. We must ensure that we are not mobilising their experiences to re-inscribe the centrality of the Western liberal way of seeing and moving through the world and the inevitability of the neoliberal variant of globalisation which denies the existence of both place and body.
We are often encouraged to find our niche. But what is more important is to find your voice and to find your tribe.