Relational regions ‘in the making’: institutionalizing new regional geographies of higher education

John Harrison, Darren P. Smith and Chloe Kinton

Regional Studies, 2017, vol. 51, issue 7, 1020-1034

Abstract: Relational regions ‘in the making’: institutionalizing new regional geographies of higher education. Regional Studies. This paper advances current debates on relational regions and higher education through a unique focus on the rise of transregional university alliances. It examines the formation of university research and training consortia to make a series of wider arguments about the new spatialities of higher education praxis, the construction of new regional identities and processes of institutionalizing relational regions. Our research shows new partnership working between universities to be conducive to the weakening of fixed regional territories. The paper then illustrates how and why some relational imaginaries are beginning to crystallize into harder institutional forms, before revealing significant political–economic and societal implications arising from new institutional geographies of higher education. Furthermore, our research reveals the concerted theoretical and empirical attention required to develop vocabulary and frameworks better able to comprehend emergent regional worlds. For our part, we distinguish between territorial, archipelagic, de facto and constellatory regionalism to exact more precise interpretations of unfolding configurations of relational regions and a new conceptual perspective on the increasingly complex spatialities characterizing and shaping our globalizing world.

Date: 2017
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DOI: 10.1080/00343404.2017.1301663

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