International Academic Mobility in a Changing Climate: Between Internationalisation and Decarbonisation
Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges of our time, yet its impacts and responsibilities are profoundly unevenly distributed. Those who have contributed least to global emissions are often among those most exposed to their consequences, making questions of climate change inseparable from broader concerns with inequality, justice, and power. Higher education occupies a particularly important position within these dynamics. Universities are privileged sites of knowledge production and critical debate, while also being institutional actors with substantial environmental footprints. Despite growing commitments to sustainability, some carbon-intensive academic practices remain comparatively overlooked, particularly international mobility. Academic travel (e.g. student mobility, conference participation, fieldwork, project meetings, visiting positions, and other forms of international collaboration), remains deeply embedded in contemporary academic and professional life. In a context where institutions compete for shrinking shares in the international and offshore student ‘markets’, partnership, marketing and student recruitment activities also require significant international travel for professional and academic staff alike.
These enduring mobility practices call into question the sustainability agendas and decarbonization initiatives promoted by universities and sectoral bodies (The Royal Anniversary Trust, 2023). Additionally, academic mobility is shaped by intersecting hierarchies that determine who can travel, under what conditions, and for what benefits. We may ask whose mobility might be further curtailed, questioned, defunded or delegitimized by well-meaning sustainability agendas.
This panel explores the tensions between internationalisation and decarbonisation in higher education. It brings together research that examines academic mobility as a socially and institutionally embedded practice shaped by internationalisation pressures, career structures, inequalities, and broader transformations in higher education. We invite contributions engaging with scholarship on the internationalisation and neoliberalisation of academia (Kim, 2017), the environmental costs of academic travel (Glover et al., 2020), and mobilities research on the structural organisation of movement and immobility (Sheller & Urry, 2006; Faist, 2013).
We particularly welcome contributions that consider questions such as:
- How do academics and students navigate tensions between international mobility, professional or educational aspirations, care, personal finance, and environmental concerns?
- How might climate concerns reshape established practices of knowledge production, collaboration, and internationalisation?
- How do internationalisation practices such as recruitment and partnership reproduce carbon-intensive mobilities, and whose travel is rendered essential or expendable in the process?
- How can we critically examine institutional decarbonisation and sustainability agendas in higher education institutions?
- How do these agendas affect hierarchies (SES, race, gender, etc) in access to academic mobility?
- How do international students themselves understand and negotiate international education in the context of climate change?
- In what ways might climate change and environmental inequalities be transforming the motivations, possibilities, and conditions of academic mobility?
- What alternative forms of academic mobility might be emerging?
The panel welcomes conceptual, empirical, methodological, and policy-oriented contributions addressing any form of international academic mobility. Contributions that bring together perspectives from higher education studies, sociology, mobilities research, internationalisation, migration studies, and climate change scholarship are particularly encouraged.
Please submit your 250-word abstract by September 20 to Thais França (
The Royal Anniversary Trust. (2023). Accelerating the UK tertiary education sector towards Net Zero: A sector-led proposal for action and connected thinking. The Platinum Jubilee Challenge.