Internationalisation and the next generation of social scientists:
Experiences of early career academics from sub-saharan Africa
Oxford CETL Network Research Project June 2010
Final Report and Policy Recommendations
David Mills, Melody Cox, Jingjing Zhang, Nick Hopwood, Lynn McAlpine
Introduction
During the last decade, the UK social sciences have recruited significant numbers of doctoral students and
post-doctoral research staff from beyond Britain. The market-led nature of postgraduate education and
growing levels of student mobility have together contributed to an increasingly cosmopolitan community
of early career researchers. Accompanying this has been a growing educational literature on ‘international’
doctoral students and the challenges they face on ‘adapting’ to ‘host’ academic cultures. However the
category ‘international’ itself risks homogenising a hugely diverse student body, presuming that a distinct
group of international students exist with shared experiences and challenges. A moment’s thought helps
one realises that a wealthy Kenyan-American who has studied at Harvard and travelled extensively
experiences UK university life very differently from a Ugandan postgraduate on a scholarship with no
prior international experience. Developing the social and academic networks thjat support a successful
doctoral trajectory is a challenge for all students, no matter what their nationality or individual biography.
Can one even generalise about the challenges facing students coming from one part of the world? Or even
about the experiences of South Saharan African nationals studying as postgraduates in Oxford. There has
been much public discussion of the economic constraints facing public universities in Africa, and the
resultant ‘brain-drain’. Yet there has been less attention to the networks through which research students
deal with the internationalisation of academic environments and negotiate an increasingly transnational
academy and global research economy. How relevant is UK academic practice for their own career
strategies and futures, whether in universities or social research, either in Africa or internationally? This
research allows us to understand students as individuals dependent on multiple networks, moving though
multiple contexts (academia, activism, consultancy), and developing multiple identities
This research is funded by the Oxford University Centre of Excellence in Preparation for Academic
Practice, a HEFCE-funded CETL tasked with helping doctoral students and early career researchers
understand the challenges, pressures and rewards of academic work, with a particular focus on teaching
practice. It extends and nuances the findings of an existing ‘The Next Generation of Social Scientists’
(NGSS) project that explored experiences of academic practice amongst social science doctoral students
(see Hopwood et al 2009). Whilst NGSS did not foreground the challenges faced by international
students, up to 40% of its respondents - a percentage typical in many research universities today - did not
hold UK nationality. As a result, many of of the NGSS project’s findings are applicable to students from
South Saharan Africa, and vice-versa.
In order to address our concern about scholarly generalisations around the doctoral experience, this
research project explored the academic biographies, doctoral experiences and career visions of sub-saharan
African students coming to study in Oxford We highlight the diversity within this group, but also explore
what, if anything, seems to be distinctive or shared in their experiences of ‘academic practice’ . We make
no apologies for a case-study primarily focused on Oxford students (supplemented with national-level data
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sets from HESA and ISB, and interviews with senior academics), partly because Oxford continues to train
a significant number of African academics, but also because this ensures a single institutional context.
Whilst the overall number of UK doctoral students has remained relatively steady, there has been a 70%
growth in the number of doctoral students from sub-Saharan Africa studying in the UK over the last 8
years, to a current figure of around 3500 (HESA 2006/7). A few universities – including Oxford,
Nottingham, Birmingham, London and Edinburgh – have significant numbers of African research
students. Because of its colonial intellectual links, not to mention the Rhodes foundation, Oxford
continues to be a hub for a range of African and Africanist scholarship, with more such doctoral research
students than most other UK universities, making it a valuable research case-study. During 2006, there
were 55 full-time research students registered in Oxford from South Africa, and another 45 research
students from other parts of sub-saharan Africa. Of these, up to half are social scientists.
Our research involved interviews with more than twenty African students studying a range of scoial
sciences at Oxford, followed up by two focus groups. We sought to document the range of their
experiences of academic practice in the UK, how their narratives are shaped by their personal and
institutional biographies, and whether their experiences are changing their career plans or their views
about academic work. We also asked about their networks (social and intellectual) both in Africa and the
UK. We complemented this with several interviews with senior staff within Oxford to garner their
perspectives on the role that institutional histories and collaborations play in shaping academic practice.
We order our key findings and analysis into three broad sections. In the first we discuss the limits and
challenges associated with labelling and categorising students. We then go on to describe students’
different experiences of Oxford and UK academic practice and the particular challenges of funding,
pedagogy and community. Our final section explore how students conceptualised their futures and careers
within the global research economy.
The thrust of this policy report is to question the value of a blanket category of ‘international students’.
We argue instead for an understanding of the student biographies within particular institutions and the
complex geopolitics of global higher education. Yes, an attentiveness to the higher education systems from
which students come is vitally important for understanding the economic relationships structuring
individual career choices and possibilities, but generic labels – such as ‘African students’ – can be
misleading. On the other hand, we do not wish to deny or downplay all differences, as our interviews
pointed to aspects of UK academic culture that the literature on international students has already
highlighted as troubling (CITE?). Yet one also has to acknowledge the very adoption of the ‘international’
label can lead people into thinking about their expereince in certain predetermined ways.
We also seek to relativise and question the notion of ‘academic practice’. For all its breadth and flexibility
as a concept, scholars thinking of working in Africa have to plan and negotiate a future that extends far
beyond the university as a career setting. Academics may, for example, spend most of their time doing
consultancy work. This, we suggest, limits the validity of the term in an African context. Current
understandings of ‘academic practice’ may needs to be rethought for universities in the global South.
Finally, we highlight the particular way in which these students understand the relationship between
universities and society, and the contributions they imagine making through an engaged applied
scholarship that seeks to work for the social good. Whilst making a difference and doing good’ were
themes that emerged from the NGSS study, these students conceptualised this role in relation to the
developing world societies with which they are linked.
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What is already known about this topic
Scholars in the developing world have written extensively of the global hierarchies, centre-periphery
relations and colonial legacies that structure disciplinary knowledge production in the social sciences (eg
Schott 1998, Alatas 2003, Ntarangwi , Mills and Babiker 2006). Rather than promoting a global academic
‘commons’, the transnational migration of students and scholars can also perpetuate academic hierarchies
and inequalities. Since independence, many African scholars at Oxford have largely depended on colonial
academic networks and Western donors for studentships (such as Commonwealth scholarships and
Rhodes scholarships), research funds and publication opportunities. Today, despite the growth of African
higher education, the limited resaerch capacity and funding available to many universities recreates this
dependency in new ways.
Recent research on international education shows that…
Findings
1) Rethinking the category of ‘International students’
Our research highlights the limits of the ‘international students’ category. Whilst the experiences of
students themselves are clearly shaped by their personal histories and provenance, this does not mean that
these will be the most important factor influencing their university experience in the UK. By a similar
logic, being a student may also not be the defining aspect of their identity. Even students from the same
country will have very different life experiences, educational experiences and career futures. The greater
awareness of. for example, financial concerns amongst Africa students may create an illusion that this is a
shared experience, whereas some of our participants come from wealthy and cosmopolitan families. these
categories make blurred spectrums into rigid boundaries. For example, the bureaucratic practice of
classifying students as ‘home’, ‘EU’ or ‘international’ for fee purposes highlights the clumsy power of state
identities, Anyone with joint nationality will strategically define themselves as European, hiding the true
levels of mobility and Africanity within the student population.
The parallels between UK and non-UK students’ experiences of difficulties make us cautious about
defining these in terms of – and ascribing them to - a student’s nationality. The following comment from
one student questioned a simplistic model of cultural exchange:
We’re all in a university, an academic community, okay? You are there to do things like research,
you know, read, you know, write and all that, and to that extent, there was not any cultural
exchanges. We are not African or American or Chinese or…Welsh or anything; we are all
academics and we interact quite happily. After every seminar, we would go to the pub.
However, our interviews also highlight how some obstacles may be experienced by ‘international’ students
as a consequence of their ascribed international status, when in fact they are prevalent among many
students. Any analysis has to tread a delicate line between reifying and denying difference. In what follows,
we highlight the diversity of our respondents’ views about finance, identity and pedagogy whilst studying
in the UK – themes that are often essentialised as core to the international student experience.
Financing doctoral study
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We initially considered dividing our respondents into different categories, based on their different financial
and personal backgrounds. Some had highly cosmopolitan networks and biographies, whilst others were
coming directly from African universities, sometimes as scholarship students. Yet nearly every student
discussed the financial pressures they faced upon coming to oxford and the UK, especially those without a
scholarship. Often they compared their fortunes with US-based colleagues:
I was looking around for places to do my D.Phil. or PhD, whichever, and Oxford obviously was
still in the back of my mind, but it seemed a long shot because I mean funding here seems very
tricky, in the UK generally, for students from Africa. In America, it seems easier because, you
know, once you get in the system, there is funding for you.
And then the other big challenge of course is that there’s no way of knowing whether one’s going
to get the funding to continue or not, when you’re not coming from the UK, and so you are
competing for a very small pool of resources with hundreds, if not thousands, of other students.
That’s really another anxiety that you have to carry with you all the time, and that I think puts
undue pressure on how one tackles the work and understands it and so on.
Secondary education in Africa is only available to a privileged minority, and scholarships are not always
distributed on grounds of merit, so it did not necessarily follow that ‘scholarship students’ made up a
distinct category.
I think that there’s more funding to go to the UK, in Zambia anyway, at least when I was looking,
but that was six years ago, so I’m not sure if things are different now. But the other problem in
Zambia is funding can not be very transparent. I don’t know if you know what I mean. When I
was doing it, there was a lot of reported nepotism.
Nor were all students coming out of an undergraduate programme: a number had experience as lecturers
in African universities, or had left postgraduate programmes in African universities to come to the UK:
Actually, prior to coming to Oxford, I had actually started a PhD programme in Nigeria, but given
my work, I didn’t have the time to do the kind of fieldwork and all those stuff, and so that is why,
when I had the opportunity for Oxford, I actually left that programme….I was the only exception,
the only one here on a scholarship. Every other person that was here at the time was here because
their parents were rich and could afford it.
Insert the quote re: a student abandoning their Masters’ degree in African university for Oxford
Others came to the UK having worked in the US or elsewhere. As one Masters student noted: “I left for
the US for my bachelor’s and Master’s, and then stayed on to work in New York, and then when I was
ready for a doctorate, I applied to Oxford, and then I thought to do a Master’s first”. There were marked
wealth divides amongst students, but these did not necessarily connect to particular attitudes or value
systems or views about returning home.
Identity
We have argued for the limitations of a literature on ‘international students’ that does not ground itself in
an understanding of the lived experiences that structure their experience today. Too often, this debate is
framed in terms of a collision of cultures. Of course, some of our respondents talked of England as being
‘far from home’; ‘very culturally alienating’, and their ‘crazy experiences of trying to make sense of it’. But to simply read
this through a culturalist lens over-simplifies a complicated dynamic. A key aspect of this has to be the
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racialisation of difference. Research into discrimination felt by ‘international’ students (Marginson 2010)
has begun to highlight this issue. Many of the students we interviewed highlighted the challenges of being
confronted with difference in their classrooms and in their course curriculum as they worked within a
European intellectual tradition and approach to studying African issues.
And the people I was with, the African Studies Department was very friendly. It took a while in
the beginning to settle in and really…it’s very different studying here as opposed to studying in
Africa. For instance, you’re in the racial minority, and it’s very different how you speak about
Africa. It’s a very different discussion, and it’s a different way of studying, so I had to adjust to
that as well, and it took a while - like you almost feel like you’re walking on eggshells.
Experiences of exclusion and inclusion are not limited to international students. In a university like
Oxford, where international students make up almost 60% of graduate students, it can be the UK
students who are marginalized, and wealthy ‘cosmopolitan’ students who create the ‘in-crowd’.
It is more than a century since W E DuBois wrote powerfully about the dislocating experience of
‘double consciousness’ felt by many African Americans. Yet this sense of having to negotiate two
very different identities - as a research student and an African - was echoed by a number of our
respondents. One student captured this tension eloquently:
I’m in two places: I’m an Oxford student in England, and that comes with its own sort of
expectations; but I’m also a Zambian, a son, which comes with its own expectations back home
and everything. But I also need to feel grounded, as a Zambian and a person and everything, so
there’s also friends from my cultural background, from Zambia and cousins/relatives who live in
the UK …I’m in the UK, but this is just for my education, but I still belong…
He rejected the too-easy espousal of a cosmopolitan scholarly identity:
It’s that whole question again of negotiating and navigating, because they are two different places
and two different sort of cultural spaces… The need to be grounded, for me, is the most
important thing. I haven’t quite yet sort of mastered how to be a sort of trans-national person and
sort of not identify with a place…For me, I think my identity still comes from a place and a
particular culture that I come from, and I feel grounded if I can still meaningfully engage and be
part of that community.
Yet this still left him worrying about how he would be seen on his return
Because, when you get home, the jokes, “Oh, he’s in Britain!” [laughing] so you…it’s the small
things that sort of mark you out …you still want to fit in ….it’s almost as if, consciously, you’re
trying to sort of avoid those kind of things, the traits that mark you out or something like that, but
it’s trying to…not apologise for being, you know, here, but it’s…it’s crazy!
Some dealt with this tension by emphasizing their desire for a life beyond academia, foreshadowing the
determination of many to link their research with activism
I didn’t want somewhere which would be sort of extremely rigorous and your life would only be
about books, so you know…so I was asking her those kind of questions and saying, look, I have a
separate life, you know…you know, relationships and everything, family, whatever, you know – I’d
like to exist not just for my books [laughing]. So I remember that was one of the questions I asked
her: would I be able to be human and not just be in one of these intense academic environments
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where you could…you know, you do excel and you do get into the subject, but you don’t do
anything.
This sense of fragmentation is also experienced in intellectual terms, as students struggle to reconcile their
principles and political commitment to the scholarly agendas being pursued in the UK:
One of the things that I find is that everything is very obviously Euro-centric, it’s Area Studies
within disciplines, and disciplines tend to take on very European perspectives, or Anglo-American
perspectives, so you find that a lot of it is approached from the perspective of somebody coming
from a particular world view. Its not that the people I work with aren’t exactly aware of alternative
viewpoints. On the one hand, they are experts who are, you know, who are open to that and so
it’s good to work with them; on the other hand, the material I have to work with tends to be
material that’s very centred on a very particular view. I’m not sure whether that’s really a
challenge, but that’s one of the things I have to deal with and find a way around.
There’s so much that’s very polemical in some areas [within] the study of Africa. So the way
academics in Africa approach the study of Africa, the way academics here, and I imagine the way
it’s approached in the States, is very different.
Pedagogies
As has often been highlighted in the literature, many of our respondents focused on the challenge of
adapting to a highly individualized student-supervisor relationship that characterizes UK academia, and the
problems that arise when these relationships didn’t work. Even those coming from academic positions in
African universities acknowledged their concerns about this change. As one African academic noted about
coming to Oxford: ‘ There was still this fear, em…this uncertainty…what is the standard going to be like, you know,
and things like that, but in retrospect, I think it was, you know, everything just went well for me’ . But it is important not
to attribute this uncertainty to geographical dislocation, when it may simply be a response to a change in
institutional context.
A consistent theme in the literature and in our own findings was the challenge of both finding out local
knowledge about academic process (and particularly financial support), and knowing who, when and how
to ask for help. They felt that all the information was there, but 'inside knowledge' was necessary to
navigate a path through it and so benefit from it. Our respondents felt that their silence in some contexts
was interpreted as wisdom rather than ignorance and confusion. They also found the adjustment to a
highly individualistic and unstructured scholarly environment a challenge: ‘here you learn self-reliance – so it
makes it hard to come here from a very structured environment but easy the other way round. Another noted that ‘the
African teaching style is much more hands-on, here it is less structured, less directed which can be good but challenging, also in
African universities you have less freedom, but your supervisor might tell you what to do’
However some acknowledged the parallels in the University systems between Africa and the UK, and the
ease of moving from one system to the next: ‘the educational system in Ghana at the time was modelled after the UK
system, so it was seen as an easy integration to, you know, easy choice in some ways
In relation to this, respondents highlighted the value of the style of the department in facilitating
knowledge flow. They highlighted coffee mornings and shared student office spaces as helping students
to share experiences and knowledges.
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Choosing Oxford, Coping with Oxford, using Oxford
If work on ‘international students’ experiences has to acknowledge the diversity of student biographies, it
also has to situate students within complex circuits of status, cultural capital and financial reward. Many of
our students knew a great deal about what the Oxford ‘brand’ might provide them with, and were working
very hard to make the most of their association. Many elaborated at length on their decision making
process, comparing the options of studying in the UK and the US in seeking to develop their own
research profiles:
I know that I wanted to get a PhD and I wasn’t going to get the funding for full-time study, and so
I was going to have to work whilst I am studying…and a number of my friends or my colleagues
have taken 10 years trying to complete a PhD because of the workload that we have to deal with,
and the impossibility of focusing on your area of study. So it was pretty evident from the word go
that if I wanted to do a PhD full-time, I’ll have to go abroad. The other option was to go to the
US, but my experience of the US when I was a visiting scholar wasn’t…it was a good experience
but I didn’t get to know much about South Africa. I got to know much about the States, but I
didn’t have the sense that there was an environment where I can root myself into South African
history and politics and that, so that left the UK.
In our conversations with them, they were also surprisingly frank about how Oxford might reflect on their
CVs, even if some realized that much of this mystique was simply another challenge to be overcome:
Coming from Oxford, people just see your CV and knowing that you have Oxford gives you a
great advantage, really a good advantage. I want to say that I’m not sure there is anything I have
applied for, in terms of grant or fellowship or whatever, since I left, that I have not gotten. I don’t
want to say it’s only the Oxford name, my publications or whatever may have added to it, but I
think that the fact that you studied in a world-renowned institution that is known, you know, and
maybe, em, people know who you worked with, your professor and things like that, you know. It
makes it easier for people to want to trust to believe that you can deliver.
I suppose I’ve always wanted to go to a university like Oxford, having grown up with this idea in
your mind that, oh gosh, there’s this place called Oxford. It took enormous sacrifice in the sense
that I had to build up a lot of social networks …because it’s so difficult to get money, the kind of
money that is needed for this kind of thing.
Because there’s this whole idea of trying to be like the typical Oxford… You know, what is that?!
It doesn’t even exist. It’s, you know, it’s better just to be yourself. So that struggle to try and find
space and fit in, ultimately I think it led me, you know, round the circle and back to the same
place: you know what, just be yourself and get in there and get on with it!
When I see myself in my career, I need to be able to speak to different sort of communities and
engage with them in a meaningful way and be able to understand where they’re coming from, and
being here is very important. I’ve…I’ve just met so many different people who… You know, I
had travelled a bit, but Oxford is I guess…you know, it’s like a Mecca of sorts [laughing]! People
come in from different places, and engaging with them and coming to know them is very…for me,
is very enriching..it is going to be very valuable for me when I get to later life when I hopefully will
start doing something that’s not just indulging my own academic interests
Students realized that their association with the Oxford ‘brand’ could cause problems in some networks,
and talked about how peoples’ perceptions of them might change:
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This kind of elite/posh institution label can also work against you, because certain networks might
not think very highly of you, so [laughing] there might be a negative kind of stereotype associated
with people from Oxford. So you’re also trying to negotiate those kind of things … I actually
came across it when I was doing my own work. So it’s something that I actually came to realise
when I was back home, that, you know, it’s not always an advantage being from Oxford. I guess
amongst fellow academics as well. You know, the crowd that I studied for my Masters with, we’re
friends and everything, but the question is: is there a certain distance that has now come just
because I’m now studying at Oxford? As I go back and interact with them, am I still one of
them?.
At a personal level, African students had to reconcile themselves to the existence of the Rhodes
foundation in Oxford, given Rhodes own exploits and colonialist ideologising:
I’m from Zambia, which used to be called Northern Rhodesia, you know, and coming here and
seeing pictures of Rhodes everywhere and walking to Rhodes House and it’s a bit difficult because
there’s a history there that’s not as comfortable, because I know what the history was with those
particular individuals and they’re not necessarily seen in the same light here as they are at home.
I guess the Rhodes scholarships have always been accused of maintaining the elite, and I do think
that’s true. I mean, that’s a real issue that of the nine South African students who are here now,
eight are white, and that really is a big thing, because it’s not like there isn’t black talent out there.
We highlight in our section on careers how many of the students had a vision for connecting academic
work with activism and social reform, and talked of their desire to return to Africa to work for the public
good. For some of the more entrepreneurial students, Oxford had enabled valuable research networks to
develop:
I think the only way in which we could have done it was through the Oxford name. We’re in the
position to raise funds, over the past three years, to…fully fund, flights, accommodation,
registration fees, and so forth, almost 50 students, 50 African researchers, from all over Africa, to
attend conferences
Careers : Negotiating a global research economy and creating ‘useful’ knowledge
If our students were strategic about how Oxford fitted into their research and scholarly careers, they were
also brutally realistic about the financial consequences of returning to Africa rather than taking up posts in
Northern universities. Many had thought at length about the options open to them, and how best to
reconcile their aspirations to be seen to making a contribution in their home countries and to the
continent as a whole. As well as talking of the financial and institutional challenges, they repeatedly talked
about how the relationship between academia and the ‘real world’ was rather different in many African
countries. Taken together, we would argue that these responses highlight the limits of a
All of our respondents highlighted the huge gaps in wealth between African and ‘Northern’ universities,
and how this influenced their own plans and futures.
The financial story is obviously a big one..salaries here are a factor of what they are back on the
continent. That’s one. Two I think is sectorial, so I think you’ll find a lot of the people who are in
the Sciences or in Medicine, they find it really hard to go back because …if you want to be an
academic, in an environment where resources count, you’re in big trouble if you’re wanting to go
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back. So I know a couple of guys who are doing, you know, Chemistry or Physics or Electronics,
and being a professor at MIT versus being a professor at University of Zambia is…it’s a nobrainer, right? .
Many mentioned the challenges of over-bureaucratised universities, the limited nature of research funding
in the social sciences, and the importance of developing consultancy opportunities, especially as one
student put it, ‘research is now almost policy’:
In academia in Zimbabwe, at least in the Social Sciences, and South Africa as well, in order to
survive, academics are becoming more involved in consultancy as well as in their academic
endeavours. So if I go and I have a career there, I need to be well prepared to sort of navigate that
kind of thing, with one foot in consultancy, another foot in teaching, because teaching is not
[laughing]…it doesn’t quite pay the bills as well. So the problem is, can you make a living, can you
feed a family?! Well, the way research is now in the international development area, every research
is now almost policy. So what I do, when I do policy research, I do it, but as a consultant, I do it,
and give whoever funds the research what they want, and then I sit down and I use the material,
the knowledge I got, and I write an academic article. So that is my approach. So…because some
of these consultancies give you opportunities to actually do good research, get good material, but
then, the donors, they don’t need that, they don’t need all the stuff, they just need something brief
to help direct them – but after that, you can use the material that you have to write what you want
to on your own, yeah. So that is what I do.
So funding for research comes through the university bureaucracy. You don’t have funding from
the private sector for research. So, now when it comes from the university bureaucracy, it’s very,
very limited, and the university bureaucracy have to juggle demand for infrastructure or this, you
know, in terms of budgeting, with that of research. So at the end of the day, research suffers, and
those that get it, get involved in a lot of politicking. So in terms of long-term academic research,
there is really no funding. There is no funding.
It’s more lucrative actually to be in the international field in Zambia than it is to be in the academic
field. Most people actually who are teaching have a second (job) – either they do consultancies or
research, so they’ll be doing something else as, you know, with the teaching as well.
Another problem they raised was the different constitution of academic fields within African universities:
I think that the problem I would have now is that Social Policy is such a broad field that I’m not
sure if I’ll fit into any particular faculty when I go home, and they’re very particular about you
having a qualification in that subject, so I’m not sure if academia would be the thing for me. I
probably, if I went back, would be in NGO work or something like that. Academically, fitting into
a field would be a problem, but also, going into academia in Zambia, I would probably have to
have had more teaching, more publications.
Some of our respondents perceptively questioned our very assumption that it was a simple choice between
contributing to their society by ‘returning home’ or not. Drawing on their understanding of the
globalization of the knowledge economy, they were able to frame the question in a more sophisticated
way:
I think the idea of going back to Africa is a very problematic one. First of all, I think there is
something slightly misguided about it, that somehow you should be able to go back in order to be
productively contributing to your society. I think that’s mistaken. I think that’s mistaken because
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it does not take into account the globalised nature of knowledge and contribution and agencies
that can be able to support one’s country of origin without you physically being there. So let’s
start by my saying that I – when it comes to questions of going back, not going back, I think the
conversation normally starts at a very wrong point. But whether people in fact go back or don’t
go back depending on what they study, I do not know there is a relationship there. I think that
your choice to go back depends on a cost-benefit analysis of the opportunities offered there for
your expertise versus the opportunities offered here or elsewhere – you know, New York,
Singapore, whatever it might be, for your expertise. So I think it’s less related to what you study,
and more to do with the opportunities that you encounter, and that might have to do with the
kind of network you either had before you came here, or you developed once you got here, and
that, for me, seems to be a bigger determinant of what it is that one ends up doing afterwards.
Our participants repeatedly emphasised their determination to make their research networks and
experience useful and applicable, of wanting to ‘plough something back’ in the hope that it would lead to
real tangible outcomes:
One thing I’ve been always sort of averse to doing is being locked in a sort of study that’s very
historical, that has no bearing on the present. This is why I’ve tried to bring my topic into the
current problems in Zimbabwe to, at the very least, give me an ability to understand what’s going
on, from a different perspective. If I’ll be doing consultancy or working in whatever capacity in
Zimbabwe, I’ll be speaking in my research to the people involved, and I’ll be able to sort of
contribute in a meaningful way to this… Because I’ve come from Zimbabwe, and I’ve come and
studied here, I see that there’s a lot that can benefit students back in Zimbabwe, there’s a lot to
sort of share…
Several had a very clear vision for the next few years, and how the DPhil provided a valuable stepping
stone to that future:
I’d like to at least build up a profile as an academic, finish my D.Phil., publish a couple of papers,
and build a profile, but, for some reason, I’d like to be on the African continent…and doing
something that is very relevant to the context of Africa and contemporary problems in Africa at
that stage. So I really want to be back in Africa, doing work there, and finding myself in a career
maybe in a regional organisation, something that has influence on policy and on the direction of
where things are going. So hopefully my time here and the networks I build can help me sort of
build on that kind of career path.
Some felt that being an academic in Africa meant a fundamentally different set of expectations about
academic practice, and about the relationship between ideas and action. This, several felt, was not
understood within the UK or the developed world:
‘(Here there is) a basic misunderstanding of the way you look at your work, coming from an
underdeveloped nation, how to use what you get as a scholar to help to make your nation to get, I
mean, better. In other words, you are not just an academic. You are also looking to ways to put to
practical use what you have learnt
I think the focus in the developing world is on research with very clear policy, practical outcomes.
And, you know, in that sense, I think the developing world can perhaps teach the developed world
something about applied research. On the other hand, there is also something to be said for the
opportunity to conceptualise ideas and so forth. We are theory-poor, conceptually-poor in the
developing world.
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Personally, I love the theory, but that’s more of an intellectual interest, and I guess, coming from a
country that is economically divided, I do feel that there is a bit of a social obligation to really
commit to some kind of active participation in society, so yeah, I mean, it’s a nice degree because it
offers both.
Finally, some had put this idealism to work even whilst studying at Oxford, and developed networks
supporting African academics:
What we wanted to do with the Society we founded was to see how we could become like a…a
small pressure group to see how we can influence things back in Ghana, both in terms of
improving educational standards but also serving as models to younger Ghanians who maybe want
to study, you know, and just like that, and doing some community work.
Conclusion
This research highlights the way in which this group of students, despite their diversity of social
and financial biographies, draw on transnational networks and experiences to both survive and
make the most of studying in the UK. The work echoes many of the findings of the NGSS study
(see Hopwood et al 2009), but also reveals the distinct ways in which issues of funding, support,
engagement and possible academic futures are experienced. As well as seeking to question the
utility of a category such as ‘international’, their voices and visions show us that ‘academic practice’
may also need to be nuanced and developed.
Policy Recommendations:
We have a number of policy and practice recommendations coming out of this research. Whilst most
focus on Oxford’s role in creating a supportive environment for graduate students, some can be
generalized more broadly:
1) Recognising the limitations of a concept such as ‘international student’ as a catch-all category.
2) Promoting awareness of funding issues amongst supervisory staff. Some students – particularly those
reliant on scholarships – have time constraints demanding structured learning. Scholarships are also
invaluable ways of supporting students during the writing up stage.
3) Encouraging greater use of Training Needs Analysis and Skills Review exercises for goal setting and to
identify and address potential obstacles early
4) Ensuring greater clarity of information for students – greater emphasis on communication to all (UK
and ‘international’ students) on how to find information. A ‘New to Oxford’ helpline or website might be
useful in this regard.
5) Highlighting and developing Oxford’s success in fostering international networks and partnership
schemes with African academics
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