Innovation Bubbles: Social Experiments in Global Chinese Higher Education

Abstract

Global growth of higher education as an industry has driven migration, economic development, and the restructuring of learning—the joint venture business model has been adapted to build collaborative university campuses which combine cultural and pedagogical diversity as a strategy for creating new sources of value in education. This dissertation is a study of how students, faculty, administrators, and government officials understand and direct “innovation” in material, everyday encounters at joint venture universities in China. By pairing contemporary histories of “the global” in China with ethnographic fieldwork at three joint venture universities, I analyze how innovation—as a paradigmatic goal of universities, corporations, and nations—drives strategic globalization. This research presents a theoretical model for understanding innovation’s cultural logics, limits, and obstacles through what I conceptualize as “innovation bubbles”—designated spaces of exception to social norms which produce and test alternative futures. In doing so, it considers how experimentation operates as a form of governance that concentrates power in China and argues that joint venture universities have become prototypes for how to address global problems in higher education.