As a goal to achieve, ‘innovation’ is a core aim of government funding for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, a framework for applying existing technologies to new markets, and a general mold-breaking force of creativity (e.g. Godin 2015). Being a global leader in technological innovation is a key feature of nation states projecting “soft power,” through the production of knowledge, prestige, and influence culturally and academically (e.g. Nye 1990, Repnikova 2022). Metaphors exert ongoing material effects on our behaviors by shaping our understanding of the referenced concept (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1980); in the 1990s, the dominant metaphors of globalization in anthropology shifted away from more hierarchical ‘centers and peripheries’ and toward a more subtle but perhaps overly vague preference for ‘multiple scapes, flows, and experiences of time.’ If ‘innovation’ is now often used as a catch-all for a positive desire to create, transform, expand, and solve, we can use the framing of bubbles (Sloterdijk 2011) to signify the material limits, boundaries, borders or restrictions that contain the potentially endless license for change. Innovation bubbles is a framework for examining the actual, day-to-day practices of experimentation in transnational spaces of education that often overlap, mutually inform, or contract in multiple directions simultaneously. Digitized, hybrid learning is continuously created from fragmented spaces across the world, in layered channels of synchronous and asynchronous institutionalized time.
What does innovation look like in daily practice? My dissertation, “Innovation Bubbles: Digitizing, Diversifying, and Financializing Global Chinese Higher Education” details the social spaces of three joint venture universities in China where a complex mixture of overlapping legal frameworks, censorship policies, and educational traditions creates experimental pilot projects defining the boundaries of academic inquiry in pursuit of innovation. Transnational education offers degrees to learners located in a different country from the degree-granting institution and is often branded as an innovation itself in the form of global education. Curricula, requirements, reading access, and extra curricular behaviors in transnational education provide direct, practical spaces for negotiating the terms of compromise between overlapping but often contradictory interpretations of innovation.