Navigating Inclusivity Challenges at Offshore University Branch Campuses

Heather Swenddal

Promoting the inclusion and belonging of international faculty members is a key concern in higher education. Research on this topic has largely focused on faculty experiences and best practices at Anglophone-country universities that employ faculty from around the world. This paper sheds light on inclusivity issues in a different higher education context: offshore international branch campuses of Anglophone-country institutions. The paper explores the views of faculty at Singapore- and Malaysia-based campuses of major Australian universities. These satellite campuses ostensibly promote an Australian ethos, yet they are primarily staffed by local professionals and are influenced by local cultural traditions--including local biases and hierarchies. This paper highlights the inclusivity challenges faced by internationalbranch campus faculty as they navigate these culturally complex settings. The findings presented in this paper draw from the author’s PhD research on the organization-based identity constructions of offshore faculty working at Australian university branch campuses. Employing a subjectivist ontology, constructivist epistemology and the methods of constructivist grounded theory, the author interviewed 37 branch-campus lecturers and leaders across four Southeast Asian campuses and used NVivo to conduct iterative analysis of interview transcripts. This paper presents select findings from this research. This paper overviews the inclusivity challenges of offshore university branch campus lecturers, demonstrating related issues through three participants’ cases. The paper shares extract from interview data with these participants and uses their cases to illustrate various aspects of inclusivity challenges in international branch campus settings. The inner workings of international branch campuses are significantly understudied, and there is a particular lack of knowledge about the views of non-parent-country branch-campus faculty about their roles and contexts. This paper contributes to this research gap, expanding knowledge on international university campuses and the challenges that offshore faculty can face. The paper also contributes to scholarship on higher education diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), demonstrating the need for global universities to expand their inclusivity efforts to offshore campuses.

Swenddal, H. (2022, May 13). Navigating Inclusivity Challenges at Offshore University Branch Campuses [Paper]. International Conference on Global Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education (ICGDI 2022), Clarion, Pennsylvania. https://harbor.klnpa.org/clarion/islandora/object/islandora%3A5435

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