CINTEUS/CESST Lecture

Inequalities and Mobilities. Transnational Pathways of Students from the Global South

Prof. Dr Carola Bauschke-Urban

Colloquium Research Semester

Nov. 18. 2025, 7 p.m. Leipzigerstr. 123, Building 22, room 217

Online participation: https://hs-fulda.webex.com/meet/agnieszka.satola

Following the event, everyone is invited to join us for pretzels and drinks in room 22.218

The lecture is featuring post-colonial and longitudinal transnational perspectives from mobile students and postgraduates from the Global South. A focus is taken on the unique challenges and opportunities as well as on the multiple inequalities faced by mobile students from the Global South. Their heterogeneous pathways were focused in the context of a longitudinal mixed methods research over a time and lifespan of more than a decade, which was locally situated within as well as across four continents.

Biographical interviews and multi-sited ethnography with mobile students from the Global South were conducted from the point of graduation with an overall institutional sample of 42 universities in Germany that offer development-oriented MA and PhD programmes in a large variety of (mostly inter- and/or transdisciplinary) programmes. These programmes from the technical sciences to economics, to legal studies and applied disciplines such as for example agricultural sciences, especially attract mobile students from the Global South, who are seeking to combine transnational academic learning with applied fields of professionalisation in- and outside academia. Transnational onward mobility as well as return mobility and their unequal entanglements were focused and analysed against a theoretical background of intersectional approaches that were combined with Pierre Bourdieu's praxeology and inequality theory. Transnational and institutional perspectives on higher education institutions in times of globally increasing internationalisation policies include a discussion of how universities, higher education policies and governments create opportunities or barriers.

The research colloquium will be bilingual. As the lecture will be conducted in English, bilingual discussion in both English or German is warmly invited and highly appreciated.

Biographical grade

Carola Bauschke-Urban is professor of sociology with focus on gender studies and diversity at the Department of Cultural and Social Sciences at Fulda University of Applied Sciences. She studied sociology and English cultural studies and literature, especially post-colonial literatures and theories at Hannover University, Bristol University and in Mexico-City. Her PhD (summa cum laude) was received in Sociology, with focus in Science and Higher Education Studies, in Gender- and Intersectionality Studies and in Transnational Migration Studies at the department of sociology and education at TU Dortmund University. She was doctoral and postdoctoral fellow at the Centre of Higher Education Research at TU Dortmund University and fellow at the Global Young Faculty of Mercator Foundation Essen. She taught as interim professor at the Institute of Sociology of Duisburg-Essen University, she was network professor at the Network Women's and Gender Studies NRW and professor of sociology with focus on Gender Research at University Rhine-Waal. She also taught (among others) at Hannover University, at University of Siegen, at the University of Applied Sciences, HAWK, Hildesheim, at Radboud University Nijmegen, at UCL London, at the German Jordanian University in Amman, at New York State University in Cortland, at Universidade R.F. Rio de Janeiro and at the International Women's University ifu. Her research was funded, among others, by the Mercator Foundation, Hans-Böckler-Foundation, DFG, EU, DAAD, BMBF, and HSMI Anti-Discrimination Office of the Ministry of Labour, Youths and Social Affairs, State of Hesse. She recently published and co-edited the peer reviewed volume 'Higher Education and Student Mobilities from the Global South' with Routledge (New York / London; 2025).

Prior to her life as a sociologist, she worked as a journalist, among others, as press officer of the International Women's University and as journalist for cultural and political programmes of the North German Broadcasting Station NDR.