This thesis examines how international student mobility is entangled in the spatial politics of knowledge production within global higher education. While often framed as a progressive force for global knowledge exchange, internationalisation can reproduce uneven knowledge hierarchies and sustain the dominance of Western epistemologies. Adopting a decolonial orientation and a comparative spatial approach, this interdisciplinary project draws on sociology, anthropology, geography, and education to explore how knowledge is negotiated, contested, and reworked through the everyday practices of international students and lecturers.

Based on eleven months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork across the UK, Denmark, and Germany, the study followed 58 participants, including master’s students and lecturers, across diverse disciplines. Methods included participant observation, lifecourse, walking, and semi-structured interviews, and a zine-making workshop, emphasising students’ narratives and knowledge practices. The analysis focuses on classrooms, campus spaces, and social settings as interconnected sites where global hierarchies of knowledge are lived, reinforced, and occasionally unsettled.

The thesis demonstrates how pedagogical approaches, disciplinary framings, and linguistic hierarchies operate as interwoven structures shaping what knowledge is valued, how it circulates, and how dominant epistemologies are sustained or challenged. It shows how international students exercise agency in navigating and at times unsettling these frameworks, engaging with knowledge in relation to their biographies, aspirations, and processes of becoming. By attending to how knowledge is lived, embodied, and made meaningful in everyday contexts, the study offers a grounded, situated account of student mobility as an affective process. It argues for recognition of epistemic plurality and structural transformation towards more just, inclusive, and decolonial forms of knowledge construction.