Internationalisation: Perspectives from German Academia

Internationalisation is a topic of widespread discussion in academia. But what does it actually mean in practice? How is the increasingly global orientation of universities and research institutions changing the academic system in Germany? And what impact will this change ultimately have on society? To answer these questions and gain insights into the diversity of internationalisation processes, Die Junge Akademie's Internationalisation Working Group invited a total of 17 stakeholders from key German academic institutions to join focus group discussions in the spring of 2021. The paper summarises the results of the qualitative analysis of these discussions in the first section. To put these views in the context of the experience of students and researchers, we then asked for comments on this analysis, which are reproduced in the second section of the paper. The comments open up interesting new perspectives on internationalisation. The paper concludes with an essay by Rudolf Stichweh on the sociological and historical dimensions of internationalisation.