Under the impact of globalization, the study and teaching of the social sciences and humanities is rapidly changing. In many ways, what we see is a growing transfer of research, knowledge, and method from the West to other parts of the world, and in the first instance China. This development is steered by far-reaching changes in the organization of higher education in both the West and in this case China, changes that in themselves have to do with changing economic conditions, and the political decisions following from them, as the result of globalization. In the final part of this article I focus upon how this works out in one particular field or discipline in the humanities: world literature.1

According to a report published by the European Commission in November 2013, Spain remains the leading destination for European university students in the Erasmus exchange scheme. Both this non-domestic audience and the launch of the European Higher Education Area have caused far-reaching changes in the Spanish university system. A more recent phenomenon to be added to this scenario is the arrival of Chinese students, of whom around 100 chose the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (USC) in 2014–2015, a university whose first official language is not Spanish, but Galician. This new situation has serious consequences for this university, both in managerial and teaching terms. The aim of this paper is to build on the experience of Chinese students and their teachers by focusing on how Spanish literature is taught and learned at the USC. Managerial aspects will be discussed within the context of current corporatization of universities, and teaching aspects in relation to comparative literature as intercultural pedagogy.

Based on a close study of the Sino-Japanese collaboration in Kunqu Opera The Peony Pavilion (2008), this article proposes a different conception of interculturalism onstage in East Asia in comparison with the prevailing East–West paradigm of intercultural performance and theatre. Some of the interesting questions that are raised and discussed in this paper are: How does the Japanese actor Bando Tamasaburo impersonate a young lady Du Liniang in the Chinese classical play without speaking the Chinese language? In what ways does the Sino-Japanese co-production connect and interweave Kunqu Opera and Kabuki? How has the intercultural performance been mediatized, received as well as perceived in China, Japan and elsewhere? The Sino-Japanese co-production features such important notions of interculturalism as connecting instead of othering, sharing instead of influencing, and complementing instead of exploiting.

Internationalization is often mentioned in university strategies nowadays. Strong efforts are made by university leaders to strengthen their position in a global market. A central factor behind this tendency is the global rankings of academic institutions. Against this backdrop, the present paper discusses the characteristics of higher education and four modes of internationalization: (a) Import of Ideas; (b) Outsourcing; (c) Insourcing; and (d) Foreign Direct Investments. It is concluded that the most significant mode of internationalization in higher education is constituted by the Import of Ideas to the home institution. In addition, it is pointed out that the striving for reputation on the home market is an important motive behind the other three modes of internationalization, all three of which have particular drawbacks to be dealt with by university leaders.

The crisis of the humanities in higher education has been around for some time. Over the years, concerns regarding this crisis have spread extensively. To the optimist, such a crisis presents new opportunities and challenges; to the pessimist, old practices die hard. In fact, the crisis of the humanities in Chinese academic circles has yet to attract proper attention and discussion. If we think of the past 30 years, it is clear that higher education in China faces this crisis, with the various instances of poisonings and murders amongst Chinese students being a further indicator of its seriousness. Thus, despite differences in its manifestation throughout various countries, it seems that the crisis of the humanities is a worldwide phenomenon. Below, I will discuss three sets of problems in order to explore some possible solutions to this crisis.

The discourse on ‘knowledge society’ and ‘knowledge economy’ often implicitly or explicitly suggests that the natural sciences are at the forefront of the development towards worldwide mobility, communication and cooperation in the world of knowledge, while the humanities and social sciences look more frequently at the specifics of certain cultures and countries or lag behind in their intention to internationalize. On dits can be persistent in the domain, among other things, because systematic information on mobility and migration of scholars, as well as on their international activities is scarce. This contribution tries to extract what can be found on mobility and migration of scholars in Europe. The available information suggests that differences by disciplinary groups are unexpectedly small.

A major challenge for education and educational research is to build on our present understanding of learning to design environments for education that are conducive to fostering students’ self-regulatory and cooperative learning skills, transferable knowledge, and a disposition toward competent thinking and problem solving. Using the CLIA-model (Competence, Learning, Intervention, Assessment) as a framework for developing learning environments, and taking the growing knowledge base on self-regulated learning as a background, this article discusses an intervention study that aimed at the design and evaluation of a powerful learning environment for fostering self-regulated learning in university freshmen, thereby improving their learning proficiency. More specifically, the intervention in this environment focused on the trainability of four cognitive (orienting, planning, self-testing, and reflecting), and four complementary affective self-regulation skills (respectively self-judging, valuing, coping, and attributing). The effects of the learning environment were investigated using a pre-test – post-test design with a control group. The participants were 141 first-year students of business economics. The positive effects of the intervention on students’ self-regulated learning and on their academic performance is illustrated for two of the eight self-regulation skills, namely orienting (preparing one’s learning process by examining the characteristics of a learning task) and self-judging (evaluating one’s competences in view of an accurate appraisal of the efforts needed to approach and accomplish a learning task).

While Past Narratives have events as their basic units, Future Narratives characteristically operate with nodes. A node is a situation that allows for more than just one continuation. Therefore, by definition, Past Narratives are uni-linear, while Future Narratives are multi-linear. Thus, by operating with nodes, Future Narratives cannot only talk about the future, but they perform aspects of futurity that seem essential: its openness, its contingency, and the fact that behind each present moment there opens up a space of possibilities that has not yet coagulated into actuality. Since Future Narratives can be found in all genres and media and, what is more, bridge the fiction/non-fiction divide, the impact of Future Narratives and their conceptualization is across the board and of greatest importance not only to media studies and teaching, but also to any kind of communicating about the future.

Garcilaso de la Vega el Inca, for several centuries doubtlessly the most discussed and most eminent writer of Andean America in the 16th and 17th centuries, throughout his life set the utmost value on the fact that he descended matrilineally from Atahualpa Yupanqui and from the last Inca emperor, Huayna Cápac. Thus, both in his person and in his creative work he combined different cultural worlds in a polylogical way.1 Two painters boasted that very same Inca descent – they were the last two great masters of the Cuzco school of painting, which over several generations of artists had been an institution of excellent renown and prestige, and whose economic downfall and artistic marginalization was vividly described by the French traveller Paul Mancoy in 1837.2 While, during the 18th century, Cuzco school paintings were still much cherished and sought after, by the beginning of the following century the elite of Lima regarded them as behind the times and provincial, committed to an ‘indigenous’ painting style. The artists from up-country – such was the reproach – could not keep up with the modern forms of seeing and creating, as exemplified by European paragons. Yet, just how ‘provincial’, truly, was this art?

The paper briefly outlines the history of Chinese educational migration to the West and discusses some of the policies and socioeconomic trends that have made China the largest source of international students today. It then presents findings from studies of Chinese students’ experiences in Europe, which indicate that personal development and time for reflection is becoming part of what some middle class students and their parents expect from the study abroad experience. This opens new possibilities for European universities in the fields of humanities and social sciences. At the same time we will probably see a growing demand for study abroad programmes that offer training for social service sector professionals, a field where China has a perceived need for developing new attitudes and skills.

The memory of classical empires has been prominent in both Chinese and European history but it has had a different imprint in each culture. The Han territories were periodically reunified in part and were more consistently ruled as unified empires from the 13th century onwards. In medieval Western Europe the Carolingian and the Holy Roman empires boasted of being renewals of the glorious ancient models but they developed in a different environment, were no longer built on the Roman scale, and only borrowed selectively from the Roman repertoire. In this essay we examine how differences in power relationships, fiscal regimes, and territoriality help explain both the peripheral impact of the classical model in the European context and the enhanced prospects for it in Chinese history from the 12th century onwards.

The great contribution of China to politics was the development of a bureaucratic, meritocratic civil service, based on mastery of a well-defined canon of scholarship. Civil servants were scholars. Already under the Han dynasty, Confucianism (the Rújiā or school of the scholars) was made the official ideology of the State and the basis of the competitive examination system. Europe was less advanced in political organization than China. Rulers and their courts relied on family ties and brute force. The only working bureaucracy belonged to the Catholic Church. This paper follows the parallel development of both the Western and the Chinese traditions and emphasizes their points of intersection, such as the Jesuit missions to China in the 16th and 17th centuries and the visits of Bertrand Russell and John Dewey around 1920.

Globalization has accelerated international and intercultural exchange in almost all aspects of life and every discipline of study has to take a global perspective for its development. This paper discusses some current issues in China’s ‘foreign language/literature’ sector, at the tertiary level of human and social sciences, and it does so in terms of localized concepts and diverse fields of study, administrative intervention, institutional organization, professional recognition, academic dilemmas, and problems and prospects of development in view of the international context of sociocultural globalization.

Since the 1990s, the Chinese government has begun to propose a neologism – the educational concept of ‘intrinsic development’. On the occasion of the 2012 Communist Party of China (CPC) National Congress, President Jinping Xi again called upon people to promote the intrinsic development of higher education. During the past 25 years, Chinese higher education has gone through drastic changes and reforms, but regrettably the idea of intrinsic development has not been expounded or defined adequately, let alone properly practised. Based on actual developments in the past and on the present situation, the author of the present article aims to examine the concept of intrinsic development and how it has been neglected or even betrayed in reality. The author concludes that the core idea of the intrinsic concept lies in improving the academic quality and level of Chinese higher education instead of worshipping the dazzling numbers of papers published and projects undertaken, in the natural growth of education from the inside instead of the quantitative expansion pushed by outside forces, in building the higher institutions and the disciplines with distinctive features instead of pursuing universal ‘comprehensiveness,’ and in developing a higher education in accordance with its internal and intrinsic laws instead of submitting to external forces, whether they are political, economic, or commercial.