What is higher education?

What is the role of students in it?

The existing scholarly literature mostly posits higher education as a place for human capital creation. By contrast, this symposium will draw attention to the active role of students in higher education and emphasise their agency and formation process. Higher education is a process of reflexive self-formation by students.

Agency, defined broadly as the human will and capacity to steer the course of one’s life, is both the condition for self-formation and its outcome. Students work on themselves in higher education in terms of personal development, aspirations, and projects. Students use their agency both during their studentship and after graduation, seeking life opportunities. Therefore, fostering the conditions which maximise the potentials for agentic self-formation is an important task of higher education.

Within higher education, international higher education provides a specific domain to investigate student agency and becoming. Students immerse themselves into novel social, cultural and political contexts through international higher education. This may lead to international students going through a compressed self-formation process, as they interact with the novelties they encounter in the host society.

Against this backdrop, this symposium will bring together esteemed scholars from different parts of the world in East and West and facilitate scholarly discussions on student agency and self-formation in higher education.

Invited Speakers and Guests

• Dr Inouye Kelsey (Haute Ecole Spécialisée de Suisse occidentale, Switzerland)
• Dr Kazuhiro Kudo (Dokkyo University, Japan)
• Ms Soyoung Lee (University of Oxford, United Kingdom)
• Dr Klemenčič Manja (Harvard University, United States)
• Professor Simon Marginson (University of Oxford, United Kingdom)
• Dr Yusuf Ikbal Oldac (Lingnan University, Hong Kong)
• Dr Thanh Pham (Monash University, Australia)
• Professor Ly Tran (Deakin University, Australia)
• Prof Weiyan Xiong (Lingnan University, Hong Kong)
• Dr Lili Yang (The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)

Programme Book

Click here

Online Registration

Please register at:

https://ln.edu.hk/sys/regbuilder/registration/sgas-ahks

Partner Organisations

• Lingnan University, Hong Kong
• University of Oxford, United Kingdom

For enquiries, please feel free to contact us at gspe@ln.edu.hk.