Problem or solution?: Academic internationalisation in contemporary human geographies in East Central Europe

Abstract

Academic internationalisation has remarkably accelerated in the contemporary period, opening up a lot of opportunities but also presenting new challenges for scholars. This paper scrutinises the complex impact of this process on human geographies in post-Communist East Central Europe. It discusses the language gap, the differences between dominant approaches in various national contexts, and the role of path-dependence and inherited structures from the Communist past, along with their impact on scholarly practice. It also investigates the uneven consequences of internationalisation at various scales and for different generations in academia. Finally, it underlines that these consequences, although they are comparable with similar trends all around the world, show some peculiar features in East Central Europe. This results from a specific, and, in global comparison, much more radical kind of neoliberalisation in this region after 1989, and from the fact that these changes have taken place in a special post-Communist context, with the neoliberal project and remnants of the Communist heritage making up a peculiar hybrid.